The musical crowd in English fiction, 1840-1910: class, culture and nation

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Author: Phyllis Weliver

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Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. Titles include: Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors) ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS Editors, Authors, Readers Colette Colligan THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture Dennis Denisoff SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950 Laura E. Franey VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE Lawrence Frank VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle Jarlath Killeen THE FAITHS OF OSCAR WILDE Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland Stephanie Kuduk Weiner REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874 Kirsten MacLeod FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle

10.1057/9780230598768 - The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840-1910, Phyllis Weliver

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20

General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA

Diana Maltz BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900

David Payne THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization Julia Reid ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE Ana Parejo Vadillo WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM Passengers of Modernity Phyllis Weliver THE MUSICAL CROWD IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1840–1910 Class, Culture and Nation

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–97700–9 (hardback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (editors) VERNON LEE Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics

Class, Culture and Nation Phyllis Weliver



The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910

© Phyllis Weliver

2006

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN–13: 978–1–4039–9994–8 ISBN–10: 1–4039–9994–5

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weliver, Phyllis The musical crowd in English fiction : class, culture, and nation / Phyllis Weliver. p. cm. — (Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–9994–5 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Music and literature—History—19th century. 3. Music—Social aspects—Great Britain— History—19th century. 4. Music in literature. 5. Social norms in literature. 6. Collective behavior in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR878.M87W45 2006 823'.8093578—dc22 10 15

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Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1

Surveillance and Musical Passion in Villette

30

2

Germanic Music Ideals in Utopian Communities: Charles Auchester, Erewhon and “Euphonia”

56

Music, Climate Theory and the Working Classes in Sandra Belloni

83

Imagining 1848 Risorgimento Opera Production in Vittoria

110

Shaw’s Fiction and the Emerging English Musical Renaissance

130

From Collective Action to Creative Individuality: Robert Elsmere, Dodo, Althea and Howards End

156

3 4 5 6

Conclusion

185

Notes

190

Bibliography

218

Index

236

vii



Contents

I began this project right after I finished my doctorate and completed a significant portion of it before I had a full-time position. It is no exaggeration to say that it would have been impossible without the kind assistance of my parents, friends, and the universities employing me. I am especially grateful to Naomi Gurt Lind, Bill Lind, and Miriam and Jason Campbell who generously shared their homes with me on early research trips. My thanks to Wilkes University for substantial Faculty Development Research Awards in 2003 and 2004, and to Wilkes University and Suffolk University for funding conference attendance. In this, Suffolk University went beyond all expectation since I was a part-time employee, and I would like to express my gratitude to Tony Merzlak for his support as Department Chair. Final revisions to the manuscript were accomplished under a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. With pleasure I remember many inspiring conversations with Sophie Fuller and Michael Allis about this book and, more generally, about music and fiction in nineteenth-century Britain. I also appreciate input from Rachel Cowgill, Roberto Dainotto, Carolyn Dever, Jeremy Dibble, Katharine Ellis, Kate Flint, Alain Frogley, Rachel Hammersley, Meirion Hughes, Hilary Poriss, Derek Scott, Jenny Bourne Taylor, R. Larry Todd, Ayako Towatari, Karen Tongson and Bennett Zon. Bennett also kindly read the earliest drafts for the book. From the beginning, Christina Bashford generously shared her then-unpublished research on concert audiences and subsequently looked at the Shaw chapter and material on the history of listening. Catherine Dale also kindly sent me her writing on program notes before it was published. Charles McGuire and Anna Celenza commented on the first half of an early draft, Jenny Bourne Taylor gave feedback on the original introduction and first chapter, Emma Sutton read Chapters 5 and 6, Roberta Marvin remarked on the Meredith chapters, and Meirion Hughes responded to the final version of the introduction. Discussion with participants in the following colloquia and seminars also proved extremely useful: “Music in Britain: A Social History Seminar Series” (Institute of Historical Research, University of London School of Advanced Study), “Music and Performance in 19th-century Britain Colloquia” (Royal viii



Acknowledgements

ix

Academy of Music), Yale University’s Music Department Colloquium, and Michigan State University’s Music Department Colloquium. For the final shaping of the book, I owe much to Joe Bristow’s expertise, as well as helpful comments from the external reader. This book project is part of a larger investigation, originally intended to include a chapter on crowd theory and gender in George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), now published as “Music, crowd control and the female performer in Trilby” in The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, edited by Nicky Losseff and Sophie Fuller (2004). Writing the essay on Trilby began my interest in musical groups, but it was soon clear that class and imagined communities in the third quarter of the century was a more natural focus for a book-length study. While I have not included the sections on Trilby in my current project, small portions of the essay dealing with the listening audience and the history of group management are reproduced in the following pages. My thanks to Sophie Fuller, Nicky Losseff, and Rachel Lynch of Ashgate Publishing for granting me permission to use the material. I greatly appreciate the fantastic work environment and friendly staff at the British Library, where I undertook the majority of my research. I am indebted to Mary Watkins for speedily processing my numerous interlibrary loan requests at Wilkes University, and I am grateful to the librarians at the New York University Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Cambridge University Library, and Harvard University’s Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library and Eda Kuhn Music Library. Many thanks to the staff and other residents at ILSC who transformed my London accommodation into a friendly home during the summers. Laura, Lila, Rachel, Rehana, Robert, Lagle, Jaya, Deborah, Fiona, Brian, Mal, Zoe, Simon, Claire, Emily – I could not have done it without your friendship. Finally, I feel continually blessed to have my family’s loving support, enthusiasm, and willing ear.



Acknowledgements



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The Queen appeared on the Palace balcony, the scene of so many historic waves in times of peace and war, and was joined by the rest of her family. The crowd became a sea of waving Union Jacks and they sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillsides” and, inevitably in a weekend of celebration that has seen a resurgence of patriotism and national unity, “Land of Hope and Glory.”1 With an estimated million people, the crowds that gathered for events marking Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 were, according to The Times, “among the largest that London has ever seen for a single event.” Music played a central role in the celebrations, with two concerts held in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, a church service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral featuring new music and old (including C. Hubert H. Parry’s “I Was Glad” [1901] ), and a royal procession embarking to the music of a full orchestra and an 800-voice choir. Before the leading members of the Royal Procession arrived, the music was heard from Buckingham Palace to Admiralty Arch, causing the crowds along The Mall to grow quiet and listen. That afternoon, a gospel choir of five thousand voices performed as one of six themed parades processing along The Mall to the Royal Box constructed in front of the Queen Victoria Memorial. The statue is an appropriate image as many of the weekend events carried on practices familiar to Victorian mass-music movements, such as the huge gospel choir drawn from communities around the nation that performed en masse a single musical piece. While the Victorian repertoire would have probably been a more complex Handel oratorio rather than the fairly simple “Amazing Grace” sung by the twenty-first-century choir, the communal nature and the religious repertoire of both are still similar. 1



Introduction

The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840 –1910

How fitting that Queen Elizabeth II would celebrate her fifty years on the throne in ways reminiscent of Queen Victoria’s reign (the last monarch to have a Golden Jubilee, in 1887) and that it would be described in language that would have been familiar to journalists and novelists of nineteenth-century Britain. The front page of The Times reported on the climactic moment of the 2002 Golden Jubilee weekend – the balcony appearance – that the “historic waves” of the royal family presided over the “sea of waving” flags. Not only is the sea image familiar to nineteenthcentury depictions of crowd scenes,2 but so is the concept of “national unity” through song. Using the modern speaker-system installed along The Mall to instruct the assembled throng to sing together (an unpublicized action) introduced an aspect of modern-day crowd leadership to which the gathering did indeed respond: they sang together Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and Edward Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory” during the balcony appearance, not dissimilar to the previous night’s concert when a crowd of similar size gathered to listen to an amplified pop concert, watching it on large screens along The Mall and joining in when Paul McCartney led the people inside and outside the Palace in the Beatles’ tunes “All You Need is Love” and “Hey, Jude.” The experience was not, in a strange way, distant in spirit from Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of 1897 when crowds gathered to witness the Queen’s appearance on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral spontaneously began to sing the national anthem. As Peter Walton reports: The dense crowds lining the streets to the east, west and south took up the air so that it seemed that the whole of London was in voice. The effect was stupendous. The archbishop of Canterbury, gripped by the excitement of the moment, so far forgot his clerical dignity as to call for three cheers for the Queen! And the people responded in explosion after explosion of sound reverberating like the roll of thunder far into the distance.3 Even though instructions were given to sing in 2002, suggesting the altered state of place occupied by today’s royalty in public esteem, the auditory effect was largely similar to the spontaneous performance a century before, when “it seemed that the whole of London was in voice.” Using television screens updated the experience of Elizabeth II’s Jubilee, but previous gatherings of large groups were similarly unified, despite the claim of an Independent reporter that “technology has also altered the way in which we perceive this sort of event. Twenty-five years ago one either



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went to the jubilee celebrations or watched them on television; now, giant screens have turned them into an interactive experience.”4 While screens did indeed make the experience visually interactive, in the past song served a similar purpose. The screens were simply added to preexisting ways of expressing national unity. The associations made between national celebrations and music are hardly surprising, considering that nineteenth-century Britain also linked the two, as seen in the huge choral festivals held at the Crystal Palace where pride in British progress was marked in part by musical performances. Indeed, the Victorian period is known not only for industrialization and Empire, but also for the beginning of what musicologists commonly term the English Musical Renaissance, which lasted from about 1840 or 1880 to 1940, depending on how this particular Renaissance is defined. While 1880 is the usual start date when emphasizing the growth of a national school of composition, from about 1840, nation-wide enthusiasm for music extended through the classes. As music critic Francis Hueffer described in 1889 when reviewing the previous fifty years: It is no exaggeration to say that with the exception perhaps of natural science, both in the applied and the philosophic sense, there is no branch of human knowledge, or of human art, in which the change that the half-century of the Queen’s reign has wrought, is so marked as it is in the spirit of music. [ . . . ] By the spirit of music is here understood the spirit in which music is regarded both by the artists who practise it, and by the amateurs who enjoy it in a more or less active manner. Fifty years ago, music in the higher sense was, to the majority of the people, an all but unknown quantity.5 Making mid-century changes in music second only to natural science is an enormous claim, but Hueffer is probably not exaggerating, especially if we consider that his careful separation of music from natural science is deceptive. As the chapters that follow demonstrate, shared patterns of understanding between music and science developed in the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, music’s presence may have been so great at this time in Britain precisely because it conversed with a variety of discourses. While work on the metaphoric or conceptual networks existing between Victorian scientific and musical discourses has been of recent scholarly interest, what has not yet been investigated is how innovations in the realm of music were perceived to influence social bodies and the individual within those collectives, and how theories about mass management



Introduction


prompted change within British and Western music that is still felt today. Here I suggest that intersections between various discourses (music and a wide range of ideas about group formation) can be thought of as mutually constructive means of conceptualizing the world. By this I mean that rather than just being figurative understandings (metaphors), theories of collectivity and musical discourse are understood through or alongside each other. For metaphor to occur, one of the fields would need to be read as containing literal meaning; a figurative understanding would occur when other fields reference that root concept. But as Susan Bernstein suggests in terms of scientific and musical discourses, one cannot “assume or posit a stable field of meaning within one discourse in order to transfer it to another.”6 In other words, none of the fields is necessarily the original from which other fields borrow, creating a metaphor. Rather than an ur-field, there is a conversation, a back-and-forth, requiring what Bernstein terms a “co-reading”7 of the relevant disciplines to understand them, because it is within the exchange that each discourse explains itself. Despite labor historians’ prevalent notion that there was a hiatus in class politics in England in the third quarter of the century,8 it is obvious in fiction written during this period that English class relations were still in flux. I follow usual constructions of the third quarter of the century as beginning in 1848 since that year marked extreme political revolution on the continent and the last massive Chartist protest in England. Additionally, some of the fiction that I examine is set retrospectively during 1848, demonstrating that authors continued to consider the influence of revolutionary events as they wrote for later English audiences. While 1874 might be a convenient end date to the quarter century, since it was the year when Gladstone’s Liberal government fell, this book mostly concludes with the early eighties when class agitation was recommencing as a result of economic depression. The period is thus extended slightly in order to examine how notions about civic order and disorder transmogrify as public unease is again performed in the streets. The present study examines musical events at which people assembled, connecting them to other ways of imagining community at the time. Recent analyses of the influences of political and city crowds within nineteenth-century literature trace how these depictions advance Jürgen Habermas’s influential concept of the public sphere as a newly discursive space under conditions of modernity. My book complements this body of work by also examining public groups, but differs by investigating specifically “aesthetic groups” which are represented not in the material public spaces of culture but within the pages of an aesthetic form (fiction).



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In other words, my topic explores a double level of cultural production (musical groups and fictional writings) and investigates how they participate in constructions of class and national identity during the middle of Victoria’s reign. In considering music, various English prose voices emerge during this period, from novelists who conceived Austro-German music to be essential to the formation of a disciplined civic state, to radical writers who found inspiration in Italian nationalist opera that was perceived to spark revolution. These political ideas also made use of and were influenced by musical discourse, which differentiated between Austro-German and Italian music on the basis of compositional technique and performance practice. Besides finding concepts about the Victorian crowd and managed group in the changing musical scene, the influence of climate theory and geography on national language and music was also present, as were Matthew Arnold’s ethnological ideas about culture. In short, the mutual influence between socio-political and musical discourses is so complex and contradictory that it is helpful to think about them in relation to recent social theories of public cohesion, community-building, and corporate bodies.

The “social” and “public” spheres of musical performance My examination focuses on the concert hall and opera house, thereby largely excluding so-called private concerts, for different etiquette was permissible in each location. As Simon McVeigh has documented, concerts held in private homes or domestic spaces that were specifically rented for concerts were a popular morning or evening entertainment in London from at least the mid-eighteenth century, gradually becoming more formal at the end of the century when they started to provide an elite alternative to public concerts, which had begun to have a less exclusive patronage.9 Despite their name, private concerts merged elements of traditionally private and public spheres, and in this they joined other activities that similarly extended the living room into the wider world. Perhaps most famously, as Seyla Benhabib argues when considering Hanna Arendt’s early political theory, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Berlin salon of Rahel Varnhagen is “a curious space that is of the home yet public, that is dominated by women yet visited and frequented by men, that is highly mannered yet egalitarian.”10 This site of sociability allowed upper-middle-class women to gather a group of intelligentsia to exchange thoughts, form friendships, and engage in romantic liaisons across lines of class, creed, and gender.11 To encourage



Introduction


conversation, intimacy was fostered within this shared space by having “no established rules of entry and exit” and by promoting “the withdrawal from the public into the sheltered space of a twosome or threesome relationship.”12 Salons were significant to the growth of modern society and a revitalized public sphere precisely because they promoted sociability between women and men in what Benhabib terms “civic and associational society.”13 An “ ‘associational’ view of public space,” according to Benhabib in Situating the Self, is not a space in any topographical or institutional sense: a town hall or a city square where people do not “act in concert” is not a public space in this Arendtian sense. But a private dining room in which people gather to hear a Samizdat or in which dissidents meet with foreigners become public spaces; just as a field or a forest can also become public space if they are the object and the location of an “action in concert,” of a demonstration to stop the construction of a highway or a military airbase, for example.14 Benhabib blurs the idea of “public” by associating it with a coordinating activity that may occur in spaces typically designated as “private,” as well as in sites built expressly for governmental purposes. Location is less important than the activity, which is defined as “public” by its collective nature. My affinity is with thinkers like Seyla Benhabib and Hina Nazar who reflect on the character of modern public space as including sites of sociability,15 alongside unambiguously public happenings, like political or governmental events. This line of thinking critiques political thinkers like Habermas who see public and private realms as a binary opposition. In contrast, Denise Riley finds a “newly conceived”16 sphere emerging in the nineteenth century: “the social” included issues of “health, education, hygiene, fertility, demography, chastity and fecundity.”17 As topics ascribed to traditionally “private” and female realms of family and domestic life were made the subject of legislative reform during the nineteenth century, Riley concludes that “the social” can be conceived as a “blurred ground between the old public and private.”18 Simultaneously, however, women were denied the vote, so were not public beings in the older sense of the public as a governmental realm.19 Occurring during the same time period as Varnhagen’s salons, London private concerts similarly combined a domestic site with the public nature of an elite audience of mixed gender. Not just an eighteenth-century phenomenon, private concerts continued to occur in the nineteenth



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century, although they often differed from their precursors. For instance, chamber music concerts were a special type of private concert that became fashionable for West End audiences in the 1840s.20 Unfortunately, there is as yet no sustained history of private concerts in the nineteenth century, but what is known is that some of them included amateur and professional soloists, some were subscription concerts and others took the tone of a musical party. Sometimes conversation was allowed while the music was occurring; in other instances, silence was expected.21 The ability to converse and move around suggests that private concerts also allowed for the formation of intimate units within the larger gathering, thus functioning more often like the salons than did more public concerts. Certainly, prose fiction depicts the occurrence of such social situations, such as when Lady Mallinger’s “musical party” in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) affords the opportunity for intense tête-à-têtes among the guests.22 While, depending on the venue, there might have been some reform in etiquette at private concerts, there was greater concern in music trade journals with forming the audiences at concert halls and opera houses into a single, silent entity. The nature of these last venues as more undeniably public make them best suited to my consideration of the public sphere. Despite Benhabib’s definition of an associational public space as potentially occurring anywhere, location and type of event were nonetheless perceived at the time to prescribe certain norms of behavior. Yet even when contemplating the opera house and concert hall, it is helpful to consider public and private blurrings, rather than dialectics. Perhaps it would be most accurate to think in gradations, whereby some social activities lean more toward the typically public and others toward the private. Thus the non-residential locations of the opera house and concert hall differentiate them from at-home concerts, yet the level of behavioral formality at concerts and the opera was debated throughout the century. To venture a large generalization, let me suggest that the aristocracy had a much more intimate and informal sense of public spaces than did the bourgeoisie and laboring classes, whose forays into bastions of musical culture included exercising an ordered behavioral system taught to them by music educators. I consider these issues in greater detail below. For now it is enough to realize that class inevitably stands at the center of any discussion of the public sphere, as does a more fluid understanding of public and private than Habermas’s research allows. Thinking in terms of the “social” and the “public” essentially positions my project not only during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, but also during a particular moment of modernity. By “modernity” I follow Anthony Giddens in intending “modes of social life or organisation,”23



Introduction


as opposed to “modernism,” which in the current study refers to the literary movement that reached fruition mostly in the early twentieth century. In The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens usefully locates the emergence of modernity “in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards.”24 To time and place are then added a number of complex characteristics, which are a subject of continuing debate among sociologists and political theorists. Included in these discussions are aspects of individual and institutional character, qualities of labor and production, commodification, bureaucracy, the public sphere, urbanism, rapidity of change, globalization, the nation-state, and the importance of print media. Obviously, there are areas of overlap within this vastly simplified list. The present investigation touches on many of them in differing levels of detail and draws particular inspiration not only from Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of the public sphere, which I will return to, but also Benedict Anderson’s equally powerful insights into “imagined communities.” Alongside Habermas’s discourse model and feminist thinkers’ conception of “the social,” the new nation-state is a characteristic of modern society. Particularly significant is Benedict Anderson’s account of the post-Enlightenment concept of “nation” in Imagined Communities, which is based upon, and has become crucial to, considerations of prose literature. His ideas emphasize an imagined political community because members of a nation are not acquainted with most other members, yet they conceive of themselves as sharing “a deep, horizontal comradeship,” despite the inequalities and exploitations that actually occur in nations.25 Anderson’s theory focuses on printed commodities (novels, newspapers) and their link to the market. Because every day a newspaper is consumed concurrently by many readers in silent privacy, and consumers see others reading the same paper, the newspaper serves as a visible representation of the imagined community. The parallel readership created by this daily publication becomes a “site both of nation-formation and class-consciousness,” in the words of John Plotz.26 However, the singular “nation” is also a potentially contested ideal because many groups make up a nation, as I consider in more detail below. People are drawn together to imagine themselves as part of a political community happening in the present moment, but it may be a community disputing the state as much as forming it. In either case, the impression of communities established through parallel readership is dependent on modes of distribution and consumption, as well as on increased literacy and the fact that identifying oneself as being middle or upper class now depended “in part on a capacity to read, think and speak correctly,” as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall put it.27



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Although dealing with different aspects of modernity (public sphere, nation), Anderson and Habermas come together in their focus on the changing role of discourse in public life. The current study builds from this discourse paradigm, with the caveat that modernity includes a mixing of conventionally private and public elements. These two thinkers have had enormous influence in the humanities and social sciences, but their theories are not as familiar in the field of music research: Anderson is only examined in relation to some areas of ethnomusicological research, while Habermas has become marginally better known among musicologists since the mid-1990s, especially and unsurprisingly in publications by German presses, mostly within historic inquiries. To date, no one has considered how the work of both theorists can elucidate musical performance in nineteenth-century England. This oversight is unfortunate for musicology, but also for the theories themselves, since the analysis of music in culture suggests that the discourses that unite communities are not necessarily based in national languages and their print cultures. This point, as I show throughout my study, is particularly evident in printed works such as prose fictions, which continually draw attention to the ways in which music can unite a national crowd through forms of signification that prove hard to capture in the printed word. Of course, other recent thinkers on modernity such as Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann also look at community, but primarily with a view to understanding today’s world. Giddens, for example, highlights a theme of “security versus danger.”28 The importance of examining modernity from this perspective has become clear in the twentieth century, especially after experiencing the horrors of totalitarian rule, nuclear weapons, and ecological destruction – none of which were envisioned in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that their seeds in modern institutions are retrospectively apparent.29 Luhmann joins Giddens in departing from Jean-François Lyotard’s well-known theory of postmodernism, which proposes that the modern period is essentially finished and that a different state of social organization emerged during the twentieth century, even if there are elements of modernity that are embedded in conditions of postmodernity. Put simply, Lyotard argues for an heterogeneity of existence in our time, and that imposing a single idea or “metanarrative” of human progress amounts to an enforcement of consensus.30 But Luhmann, in examining life today, focuses on the idea of a continuing modernity and takes observation as his subject, instead of looking at metanarratives. By observation, Luhmann intends something quite different from Michel Foucault’s evaluation of “the gaze” as organizing public life in



Introduction


post-Enlightenment Europe.31 Instead, Luhmann explores how individuals and disparate systems within modernity all rely on observing an observer, from reading a novel and seeing more than the protagonist does to following a therapist’s suggestions.32 In Observations on Modernity, Luhmann asserts, “[t]he specific modernity of this observation of the second order is inherent only in that it no longer relies on a collective world [ . . . ], but also, if not primarily, in that it examines the question of what an observer can and cannot see with his distinctions.”33 By emphasizing individual perspective (an observer) as the guarantee for reality, Luhmann to some extent continues Romantic ideas of the self as constructing the world, but he then turns the construct specifically into modernity by suggesting the limits of internal knowledge and therefore the need for a second observer. In contrast, my focus is on the collectivity that Luhmann dismisses, but which was a prominent concern in nineteenth-century English constructions of public space and individual identity. Because the current project is most interested in how Victorians conceptualized themselves, Habermas’s and Anderson’s theories have proved more helpful to my thoughts than Giddens’s and Luhmann’s models, which look for features that extend from modernity’s inception through to today. Put another way, my topic is located within the larger discussion of conditions of modernity, but I focus on a specific span of years in England, instead of making claims that would be recognizable in all modern institutions and conceptions of individual identity, from the seventeenth or eighteenth century to the twentieth or twenty-first century. Habermas’s rather idealistic idea is that “[t]he public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body. [ . . . ] Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion about matters of general interest.”34 In 1790s Britain, foundations were laid for the working-class movements of the next century as the Jacobin intelligentsia began to educate men about how to articulate and organize their feelings of social discontent, often through reading, thought and discussion occurring in clubs and coffeehouses.35 This conversation was one way that the middle classes could draw together and win for themselves “independence from aristocratic patronage and a client economy,” as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall observe.36 While the clubs might promote “unanimity and harmony” among members of disparate trades, politics, and Protestant sects,37 however, they were only one type of voice making itself publicly heard. Considering the multivocality of the public sphere is essential because recent scholarship argues that the public sphere as a ground of rational



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conversation was not as ideal as Habermas suggests. Rather, this sphere was “the product of a struggle to order meaning,”38 as John Plotz opines – a site of contest where, according to Geoff Eley, some “ ‘publics’ (women, subordinate nationalities, popular classes like the urban poor, the working class, and the peasantry)” may have been excluded to some extent at one time or another.39 In fact, these “publics” also belong to what were previously perceived to be private realms. Following Benhabib’s definition, political theories of “privacy” have traditionally included three areas: “moral and religious conscience,” freedom of commodity exchange and the labor market, and the intimate or household sphere, including sexuality and the care of children, the elderly, and the infirm.40 It is precisely the people who are dominated in these “private” spheres (women, religious minorities, workers) that are sometimes excluded, but nonetheless beginning to make their presence noisily felt on the street and in print. In other words, in post-Enlightenment England, what had been considered “private” was now struggling for formal recognition in discursive space. The disputes or struggles for meaning between different public voices continued from the late eighteenth century through the whole nineteenth century and expressed themselves through such modes as journals, newspapers, pamphlets, novels and political gatherings. This public sphere was where “it was decided what would come to count as public conversation at all,” as Plotz writes. “[E]very text that circulated, and every social phenomenon that moved into public awareness – crowds being the paramount instance of such a phenomenon – served to shift the terms of debate, to unsettle in a small or a great way the notions of what counted as public speech and action.”41 Texts might take forms as varied as “editorials, parliamentary debates and rulings, protests, and poems”; they might therefore be seen as “circulating speech-acts within a more or less fluidly constituted zone of publicity.”42 The public sphere was also connected to the growth of urban culture, with musical performance playing a significant role. In this sense, public culture included the following: locally organized public life (meeting houses, concert halls, theaters, opera houses, lecture halls, museums), [ . . . ] a new infrastructure of social communication (the press, publishing companies, and other literary media; the rise of a reading public via reading and language societies; subscription publishing and lending libraries; improved transportation; and adapted centers of sociability like coffee houses, taverns, and clubs), and [ . . . ] a new universe of voluntary association.43



Introduction


These venues for “locally organized public life” (including concert halls and opera houses) were sites of conversation and sociability for the members of the social elite in the eighteenth century. While nineteenth-century audiences started to quiet down during the musical performance, there were still intermissions during which audience members socialized with each other, if they did not simply carry on older practices of conversing during the music-making. Besides conversational opportunities, attendance at these events by the newly affluent bourgeoisie allowed them visibly to demonstrate social prestige, especially when they sat in high-priced reserved seating. The social function of audience seating continued to the end of the century and included operatic audiences as well as concert audiences. In her discussion of Wagnerian audiences in fin-de-siècle Britain, for instance, Emma Sutton shows how the organization of audience space “acknowledged, displayed, and reinscribed social hierarchies” through “clearly segregated areas of the spatial environment.”44 Despite this spatial display, however, frequently the behavior of the different classes contrasted markedly with each other, thus both the concert hall and the opera house were sites of “discussion” about when to speak and how to act. Some of this behavior was influenced by the “infrastructure of social communication,” which included articles in music journals and the programs printed for concerts, both of which attempted to shape new concert etiquette: a musical performance was now seen as a homogeneous experience that should not be disturbed by conversation, premature applause, late arrival or early departure. The behavior of audiences attracted notice in the Musical Times as early as 1848, during the editorship of J. Alfred Novello, and a number of significant articles specifically on audiences appeared between 1863 and 1887, while Henry Charles Lunn led the magazine. During this period, there were gradually more features on English audiences until the subject reached its zenith in the early to mid 1880s. This period coincides with the growing number of musical articles published in Macmillan’s Magazine between May 1868 and April 1883, when George Grove edited the journal. Both the trade journal and popular periodical simultaneously increased their discussions of music; program notes were also on the rise during the third quarter of the century. In short, attempts began to be made to structure and limit the unrestricted conversation that had occurred until around the 1820s and 1830s in the concert hall, replacing it with scientific rationality in the critical listening methods being taught. In what seems to be a specifically British phenomenon during the nineteenth century, analytical programs or program notes were a particular



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genre of printed text produced expressly to educate audiences about how to listen. Of course, Berlioz had fashioned a program or story to accompany his Symphonie Fantastique in 1830, but this single instance was far from the phenomenon that the practice became in Victorian Britain, nor was it analytic in the sense that British notes were. The differences were observed at the time by prominent writers such as George Grove, who claimed the program note was unique to Britain in the nineteenth century, as Bashford records. Catherine Dale attributes the British practice to the fact that “more rigorous analytical methods pioneered in Europe” were not part of the British concert hall experience, and that on the continent this analysis was found in pamphlets published independent of specific performances. British program notes are significant for directly juxtaposing musical analysis with actual performance, thus making a specific link between public education and concert environment.45 While Victorian and subsequent scholars generally credit the birth of the program note to John Ella, conductor and director of the Musical Union, the first notes were actually authored in the late 1830s by John Thomson for the Professional Society Concerts in Edinburgh.46 In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, program notes accompanied some London concerts (e.g., the Philharmonic Society, the Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts), were increasingly provided in the 1870s, and became the norm in London by the 1880s. Until the 1890s, most provincial concerts (excepting places like Manchester and Liverpool) simply listed song lyrics and the order of the pieces. If analytic programs were provided in the provinces, then they were often reprinted from those written for London performances, a practice that also occurred at times in the capital.47 These program notes – prose passages sometimes interspersed with musical examples in score notation – were meant to inform the listening process by identifying themes and their transformations in instrumental works. They thus helped to initiate one of most striking changes in nineteenth-century audiences: the gradual shift toward quieter listening. In her article, “Learning to Listen: Audiences for Chamber Music in Early-Victorian London,” Christina Bashford explicates the complexities of tracing the history of listening because the practice alters in meaning depending on the type of music performed, the circumstances of the performance, the listener, changing social conventions, and the fact that silence might mark either passive or active listening.48 Still, changes were clearly afoot, as demonstrated by the very disagreements over concert etiquette. Elite audiences often attended concerts and the opera in order to socialize, while music professionals believed that the audience



Introduction


should listen comprehensively, which would focus attention on the music itself. Serious musicians therefore improved programming standards and taught the English public the attributes of musical excellence, and these initiatives went hand in hand with the gradual quieting of concert and opera environments. Behavior at concerts and operas was thus not only a marker of class but also a subject of comment and communication in terms of how and when people conversed or listened, moved about or sat still. Concert halls and opera houses were notable not only as public venues, but also for the activity occurring within them; they frame part of the struggle for meaning that made up the public sphere. Moreover, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the exponential growth in music as a leisure activity made it especially important as a shaping factor of the public sphere.49 Of course, there was growth in other commercialized leisure activities in late-Victorian Britain besides the more elite musical events, such as professional sports, seaside resorts, the popular press and the music hall.50 Concert halls particularly interest me because in these sites of “locally organized public life” an aesthetic literally shapes the public sphere: the sanctity of the musical program began to be stressed by event organizers in Victorian Britain, and as the music was emphasized over more general sociability, ideally sound became an organizing focus and the reason for attending the event in the first place. Music educators progressively stressed newly important notions of a coherent program and the inviolability of multimovement compositions instead of programming single movements in concerts, or applauding individual songs or soloists within oratorios. London audiences at the Musical Union and the short-lived Beethoven Quartett Society were especially encouraged to concentrate for the duration of the concert when concert organizers like John Ella and Thomas Alsager simply decreased the number of works performed and limited them to serious instrumental pieces. Programs combining instrumental and vocal music could otherwise last for three or four hours, which required a long attention span and therefore only encouraged people to come and go.51 Given the length of most programs, it was noteworthy when audiences did listen for the entire program, such as when the author of “English Audiences” praised working-class audiences who could sustain their concentration for “at least three hours” while “standing in a dense mass.”52 Working-class audiences seemed especially skilled at high levels of concentration, as seen at brass band competitions.53



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Introduction

15

There is no stiffness nor formality in these classical entertainments. It is like the enjoyment of a social circle. The artists mix with the amateurs [ . . . ] and between the parts the company descend to take tea, or other refreshments, and discuss amicably the beauties of the compositions just heard, the merits of the executants, and the prospects of the all engrossing question – the two rival Italian Operas.55 Dulcken’s Soirées or Matinées Musicales (1843–1849) were held in what Christina Bashford calls “private rooms” on exclusive Harley Street.56 Even though they therefore represent only a small section of Victorian audiences, the audiences at Dulcken’s concerts are significant because it was this elite class that had usually attended concerts to see and be seen, generally maintaining distance from the artist class. Changes at concerts were afoot as audiences learned not only to listen to musical performances, but also to converse about the music, doing so across class boundaries. In other words, the associational dimension of the public sphere was being ordered and organized through auditory experience. Sociability was encouraged, but within a set of behavioral norms and conversational topics. Aristocracy, bourgeoisie, artisans, and laborers alike experienced the changed environment at concerts, although not always at precisely the same concert because of varied ticket prices. The focus at musical concerts may not have literally been national politics, as it was in conversations and rallies conducted by discontented workers earlier in the century, but the attempt to integrate the classes into a single, quiet body mirrors mid-Victorian political cant regarding the existence of a social aggregate, rather than “the two nations,” rich and poor, referenced in the subtitle of Benjamin Disraeli’s political novel, Sybil (1845).57 However, the ideal as advocated by the musical establishment was different from the depictions of concert scenes in fiction, or even the reality since music journalists also reported on unruly audience behavior until the end of the century. Of special interest to the present project is that in articles decrying encores, the power of the audience to create disturbance is described in terms reminiscent of a depraved, bestial mob. For example, the popular



The implication is that in this era of vocal social unrest, order was imposed as all the classes were trained to listen rather than converse, were taught what to listen for, and also what to discuss in the interval (a sophisticated evaluation of the music).54 As the Morning Chronicle reported in 1847 of Louise Dulcken’s concerts:

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Mr Sims Reeves, after singing “Tom Bowling,” was of course called upon to repeat it: five times he came on the platform to acknowledge the applause, but those who had resolved to make their favourite vocalist do double work were not to be thus baulked. They refused to listen to Miss Brousil, who attempted to play a violin solo; they hissed and hooted Mr Pyatt, who, after endeavouring to obtain a hearing, led Miss Brousil from the platform; and it was not until several of the audience, who were content to accept the programme as it was offered to them, had left the room in disgust, that anything like order was restored. Now certainly if a body of persons were, from any other cause, by persistent noisy demonstrations to prevent an entertainment from proceeding, they would be forcibly ejected from the room by the police; and we really can see no reason why the “encore” nuisance should differ from any other nuisance. We much regret that concert-givers have not the courage to abolish the system of repetitions altogether; but if this cannot be, it would be good if the matter were brought into a police-court, so that a magistrate might decide whether persons who purchase tickets to hear a concert are to have their enjoyment marred by the clamour of those who presume upon a supposed right to have any pieces they please over again.58 The comparison of audience behavior to civic unrest and the need for police intervention is striking. As only part of the audience joined in the “ ‘encore’ nuisance,” the concert is established as a site of struggle, between audience and performers, but also within the audience. The author recognizes the conflicting behaviors and makes the point in terms of civil rights that should be enforced, thereby tying concert etiquette to other public sites (where order is expected) and to other Victorian institutional processes of managing collective behavior (discipline and punish). Beyond simply establishing order and quiet in the concert hall, the issue of programming is central to the above citation: at the root of the problem is an inability to “accept the programme as it was offered.” Rather than audience members shaping the concert and the public sphere into their own “event,” they must accept the organization established for them. On the one hand, an aesthetic exerts a shaping force over the public sphere; on the other hand, it is a reshaping of the public realm along the requirements of serious if not professional musicians, rather than



British tenor Sims Reeves had more than one disastrous concert experience because of his or his fellow soloists’ refusal to perform encores, as in the following account of a Liverpool ballad concert in 1875:

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upper-class prerogatives. Using the argument of market power, the article recognizes the clout of a public educated to appreciate the ideals put forth by the profession, so the musical program should not be disfigured by “clamour” and “noisy demonstrations.” The pejorative language of the mob in effect denigrates the “body of persons” who disturb public order, while supporting the idea of a crafted aesthetic experience for a public who appreciates, understands and, through disciplining itself, finds individual enjoyment while promoting a collective silence. The artist (musician) is essentially a social leader, because he or she establishes public order through dedication to the inviolability of cultural standards rather than the behavioral prerogatives of the ruling class. Therefore, despite the general perception that the public sphere calmed down with the subsidence of working-class agitation, it was actually continuing to change in the second half of the century. Disparate discussions regarding this change took place most visibly in fictional depictions of aesthetic events. Moreover, people continued to attend concerts to socialize and flirt, despite what the musical establishment projected as the goal of the concerts (the music itself). Novels, which prove highly responsive to these public spaces, depict concert scenes as an opportunity to meet others, with conflict arising when romantic partnerships occur between people from different social tiers, as happens in George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni (1864), George Bernard Shaw’s The Irrational Knot (1880) and E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). Yet as much as this fictional portrayal of a “social” environment conflicts with the rhetoric of music journalists, literary prose has an unequalled capacity in accentuating an interesting trend that supports the values of the musical establishment. Most of the works of fiction that represent musical crowds focus on the bourgeoisie, and these literary narratives show that within this class there is progressively more social cachet to listening intently to music. However, later fiction noticeably censors the audience’s concentrated listening as posturing rather than true musicality. Fin-de-siècle literature was thus highly critical of musical trends, but it also expressed an ideal. Narratives throughout this period continue themes developed by Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold about the social task of the artist; as a consequence, the musician not only becomes a moral and spiritual leader within a musical sphere, but also within social and political realms. Building from these ideas, the present volume argues that another means of imagining nationhood and another form of “literacy” was provided through public musical events; a fresh voice emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century besides the already well-documented



Introduction


clamor of political debates, newspapers and activist crowds. In the concert hall and opera house, an often elite public came together to converse and listen in newly regulated ways, while the laboring classes and Dissenters, attending their own concerts and practicing a special type of musical notation (Sol-fa and Tonic Sol-fa), were similarly encouraged to occupy their leisure time in disciplined ways and thus join a national unity ruled by the social elite. Sol-fa and Tonic Sol-fa were systems used within a national movement to teach sight-singing to the people. During the height of Chartism, the “sight-singing mania” of 1841–c.1844 began to use working-class musicmaking for what bourgeois philanthropists hoped would be a newly effective mode of moral reform, rather than music simply being an activity for its own sake. Victorians did indeed make a strong connection between music and social improvement from at least the 1840s through 1914.59 Dave Russell’s Popular Music in England provides a particularly fine analysis of the topic in terms of contemporaneous political activity; he suggests that this movement resulted from the trepidation with which reformers viewed industrial workers who were forming large communities that were “intemperate, ill-educated, ill-disciplined and increasingly prey to the public house and the singing-saloon.”60 The connection to fears regarding the mob is obvious and Victorian reformers therefore sought to provide alternative modes of recreation that were morally instructive. The combined efforts of educators like Joseph Mainzer, John Hullah and John Curwen not only brought music to the masses through innovations in teaching sight-singing using “fixed doh” (in the case of Mainzer’s and Hullah’s “Sol-fa”) or “moveable doh” (Curwen’s “Tonic Sol-fa,” based on Sarah Glover’s system), but they also emphasized moral reform and religion, helped the temperance movement and attempted to smooth over class conflict.61 While this early movement did not alleviate all the feared evils of the public house or Chartism, Russell documents the actual outcome of what J. Spencer Curwen termed the “democratisation of music”:62 the idea that music, as having a “valuable social purpose” became a “truism” accepted by many Victorians.63 Moreover, the sight-singing movement can be seen as a nation-wide “literacy” movement for the working classes. Given the low literacy rate among laborers in Victorian Britain, an entire class was largely denied participation in Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined community” since the notions of “nation” and “public sphere” are dependent on reading. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a period when franchise reform was still debated for working-class men, literacy levels in the working classes were incredibly low. According to David Vincent,



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in the period between 1859 and 1874, only 37.8 percent of skilled laborers’ weddings and 19.8 percent of unskilled laborers’ weddings have registries where the bride, groom and two witnesses were able to write their names.64 Then again, another method of imagining community was provided through a specific type of (musical) text taught to workingclass men, women and children. I do not mean that all musical laborers were illiterate, but rather that mass-music movements provided another means of being united and imagining community, and included participates who could read words along with those who could not. As part of the mass-music movements in mid-Victorian Britain, sightsingers were taught to read a specific sign system that was drawn on chalkboards in singing classes and published in thousands of music books. This “text” differed from traditional, staff notation. An account of Glover’s method (and later Curwen’s) is given in The Story of Tonic Sol-fa: On this [chalk]board were printed one above the other the initial letters of the Sol-fa syllables, showing much shorter distances between m and f, and between t and d (the third and fourth and seventh and eight of the scale, for in this method, d is always the key-note) than between the other notes. This Musical Ladder, as it is styled, corresponds with what we have called the Modulator. [ . . . ] The children are thus rendered perfectly familiar with an accurate pictorial representation of interval [sic]; indeed, they must carry a musical ladder in their mind’s eye wherever they go, and by the correct association of mind thus established, they are well prepared for the next stage in their advancement.65 The initial letters of Sol-fa would correspond to doh, re, mi (the syllables of psalmody) and the shorter distances would represent half steps in the scale. After learning from chalkboards in Glover’s Norwich school, the “next stage” was to read from a Sol-fa book while beating time with “short wands,”66 with the children associating sound with a mental image of the Musical Ladder or Modulator. Eventually, the singer would move on to published music ranging from that by the great composers of the past to that by living British composers, all translated into syllable notation. Because of its basis in a sign system known only to its practitioners, the sight-singing movement formed a community paralleling Anderson’s account of “nation” as an imagined group established by print media and parallel readerships. Not only do the syllables form a text, but when individual choirs practiced in anticipation of uniting into a massive, combined choir, they practiced their own brand of parallel readership.



Introduction


However, there are key differences between singing together and reading alone. In the first, immediate community does not have to be “imagined.” A practitioner reads the syllables on the page or chalkboard, voices them, and hears himself or herself amidst a group – some of whom sing the same part while others contribute another vocal line to the sonic texture. Community is physically experienced as immediate, auditory and complementary, even when it has multiple vocal lines. But combined with this communal experience would be an “imagined” participation in a larger choir, and a wider Tonic Sol-fa or Sol-fa community. Despite Sol-fa’s indebtedness to French models, Tonic Sol-fa was an English system extending as far as its missionaries, making it similar to Anderson’s notion of print media that created communities based on language more than geography. The extraordinary popularity of singing by syllables is exemplified by John Curwen’s movement: the first Tonic Sol-fa Association gathering was in September 1850 and by the end of 1856 there were an estimated 20,000 students of his system in England and Scotland. By mid-1858, 65,000 practitioners were computed in “town and country” and in 1872 there were approximately 315,000 adults and children practising the method throughout Britain, “Madagascar, Cape Colony (for the Kaffirs and the Dutch), Hong Kong, Beyrout [sic], Mount Lebanon, Fiji, South Africa, Bombay, Calcutta, Barbados, St. Helena, Norfolk Island, Spain, Burma, Chili, &c.”67 Extending nationally and globally, Curwen’s popular movement drew its practitioners together into a large community who could all read Tonic Sol-fa and who performed it in huge concerts in London, the Empire and beyond. For instance, the Tonic Sol-fa Association’s Juvenile Choral Meeting in Exeter Hall on 24 June 1857 was so successful that it was followed by a concert at the Crystal Palace of 3000 children singing according to the Tonic Sol-fa method.68 There was an additional boost to the sense of community through the publication of the Tonic Sol-fa Reporter, which included pieces of music published in Tonic Sol-fa notation as well as articles for those who could read words.69 To a large extent, the Tonic Sol-fa community ran parallel to those who formed a reading community, precisely because of its basis in syllables rather than staff notation. Moreover, the musical community itself was divided between two communities; the Tonic Sol-fa system was often perceived to create limitations in the musical ability of its adherents, despite Curwen’s assertion that singing by syllables was a first step toward reading staff notation. The difficulties of getting Tonic Sol-faers to move from syllables to staff notation was a criticism extending to the end of the century, as when the Principal of the Guildhall School of



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Music, W.H. Cummings, remarked on the problem, calling it “the tyranny of the syllables.”70 Even though most of the venomous attacks on the sight-singing movement were confined to feuding between Curwen’s and Hullah’s respective followers, there were opponents to the whole system. These detractors usually spoke of the problems of bifurcation, where singers in the same choir, taught respectively to read syllables or staff notation, had to work off different parts with different pagination. Indeed, this practice figures the issues involved: segregated in reading ability, the choristers nonetheless united in a single musical performance. So was it unity or segregation that occurred through the increasing interest in music? Certainly, working-class music literacy could be seen as having a glass ceiling. Despite the arguments of Tonic Sol-fa’s proponents that sol-faing was a step toward learning musical staff notation, it was nonetheless frequently perceived to inhibit this very process, thereby promoting segregation and hierarchy. Similarly, the classes were separated through reserved seating even when attending the same concert. As William Weber observes in Music and the Middle Class, in the 1840s in London, Paris and Vienna, a new practice of reserving high-priced seats replaced general admission and, at the same time, middle-class prosperity was on the rise. As a result, seating in concerts became a marker of class aspiration and achievement as the affluent bourgeoisie and aristocracy rubbed shoulders in high-priced seating.71 Meanwhile, the small community of gentry who had primarily met in public during the eighteenth century began to socialize at their own residences with greater frequency.72 With the public space much less oriented around a group of people who knew one another, seating was a valuable signifier of class. These ideas are well-established, but what I emphasize is that different concert etiquettes and musical skills also marked class identity, as well as national identity. The two did not always rest easily together.

Why fiction matters to musical performance in this period My above discussion of journal articles, program notes, and books by professional nineteenth-century musicians highlights critical-rational expression. Having briefly examined publications by professional musicians, we see that politicians and musicians both aspired for a quiet public sphere and sometimes used similar discourses to achieve it, such as the language of the mob. As we move forward in the following chapters, I look at these aesthetic (musical) gatherings embedded in another form of aesthetic production (fiction), which also displays a strong interest in exploring the cultural significance of musical performance and public groups.



Introduction


Literary scholars, following Q.D. Leavis, have for many years contemplated how the nineteenth-century novel formed the reading public. But it is useful to reprise some of the leading ideas that have illuminated how people understood reading as a distinctly corporeal experience that could link the individual to a larger body, such as the nation. Building from Victorian science, Alison Winter substantiates how a community of readers could be formed and indeed conducted through the perceived common physiological reactions of readers to sensations aroused by literature, a belief that made the watchdogs of Victorian culture uneasy about the popularity of low-brow literature, which promoted emotional responses instead of rational and moral reflection.73 According to associationist psychologists and physiologists of the time, these responses would carve grooves or channels in the brain that would deepen over repeated exposure, become habitual and eventually, perhaps, be inherited by subsequent generations. This anxiety focused on the racial survival of the English people and the need for them to evolve, rather than degenerate into animality through the gradual entrenchment of sensual responses to certain types of narratives.74 The discourse of mental science was apparent in writings about Charles Dickens’s celebrated public readings, for instance, where the novelist envisioned himself as conducting his audiences’ emotions: he raised them to frenzy and then calmed them when they threatened to break into mob hysterics. The audiences responded to Dickens’s leadership in a “semiwilled” state, similar to descriptions of the unconscious that were included in the discourses of mesmerism and, later, crowd psychology.75 These public readings were also significant for Dickens’s deliberate attempt to bring the classes together. Although admission prices were differentiated based on the wages of the ticket-purchaser, seating was unsegregated – a practice that differed from seating in theaters, concert halls and opera houses. However, as Helen Small documents, the success of the readings at bridging class differences did not perhaps meet the stated ideal because ticket prices were still too high for the lowest incomes, and because the many illiterate laborers had little, if any, knowledge of Dickens.76 Additionally, according to accounts of working-class life by factory workers such as Ada Nield Chew, few laborers had the time to read even by the end of the century. By then, labor reforms had already begun to be enacted, although they obviously did not go far enough.77 Still, Small astutely argues that more important than the success of bringing the classes together into a homogenous whole is the attempt to do so; the interest lies in the assumption that a general reading public could be formed and molded, an idea which is quite unlike modern



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accounts of reading practices and their effects on individuals and communities. This perception of the public having en masse enough cultural capital to understand cultural references and literary subtleties was acknowledged at the time to be rather far-fetched. Wilkie Collins’s observations on the subject were front-page news in Dickens’s journal, Household Words, in 1858: Do the subscribers to this journal, the customers at the eminent publishing-houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and reviews, compose altogether the great bulk of the reading public of England? [ . . . ] the public just now mentioned, viewed as an audience for literature, is nothing more than a minority.78 Collins defines who the “reading public” was generally thought to be and he demonstrates awareness that it was a minority compared to the estimated three million readers of penny periodicals, a form of publication that Collins identifies as readily available to the masses, although of low literary quality. Collins hopes that with time this great “Unknown Public” will gain enough cultural capital to discriminate between “a good book and a bad”79 and will therefore call forth their own great novelists. Especially notable is the connection Collins makes between public and author. While, as Small writes, the act of reading as private rather than public was the more familiar concept to mid-Victorians,80 Collins’s vocabulary reveals a perception of reader as “audience” and “public.” Even though words were privately digested, the printed page and the readers were part of a larger discursive space that shaped and debated itself: the reading public was forming through their market power the type of literature that would be produced, but they also needed leadership regarding what prose and poetry should circulate in the public sphere. Simply put, publishers, journalists and novelists supposed themselves to be educators and “directors” of the public. Besides Dickens’s management of his listening public at the Readings, for example, he perceived himself as directing his reading audience since he titled his periodical Household Words: A Weekly Journal Conducted by Charles Dickens. The idea of directing is so important that it is prominently spread throughout the journal: as each page is turned, “[Conducted by Charles Dickens]” splays across the header, so that the first two words are on the left side and the last two are on the right. Advertisements for the journal



Introduction


went a step further, adding the line “[d]esigned for the instruction and amusement of all classes of readers, and to assist in the discussion of the social questions of the time.”81 Literary works and periodical literature were concerned with a massive public collective spanning “all classes,” and were meant to partake in social debate. The author and editor “conducted” the discussion, suggesting that the public was to be managed and worriedly watched, similar to the crowd in the streets. Indeed, the power of reading was feared by Samuel Taylor Coleridge because the simple fact of literacy did not necessarily make a discerning reader, as Collins also noticed. Far from embracing the hopeful ideals of Collins and Dickens, the anti-democratic Coleridge wished that the greater part of our publications could be [ . . . ] directed, each to its appropriate class of Readers. But this cannot be! For among other odd burs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity, we have now a READING PUBLIC – as strange a phrase methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of Meditation82 Coleridge’s contrast between the idea of a “public” and “Meditation” brings together two key ideas. First, the “public sphere” as conceived of by Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Hanna Arendt and Bruce Ackerman is a site of thought and discussion, even if they propose different dialogic methods.83 A discursive public sphere necessarily makes the act of reading both private and then public, if the reader is responsibly to contribute to public dialogue. Obviously, Coleridge’s dubbing of Meditation’s response as “splenetic” demonstrates his doubt that such responsible thought occurs. Second, implicit in the idea of literature sparking meditation that influences the public sphere is the belief that issues within fiction and non-fiction prose often mirror this private and public interaction. It is precisely the rub of this interface that is to be meditated and discussed, and therefore it is necessarily a site of conflict and struggle within the literature itself. Victorian fiction as focused on the private, inner space of the individual is no surprise; recent criticism of Victorian novels is dominated by psychological approaches, where the interior of the self is probed almost to the exclusion of examining the social forces that also act upon it. In contrast, I am interested in the individual and society as mutually constructing each other: the individual acting on and reacting to perceived behavioral norms (whether they spring from class or gender expectations), and the person and society as sites of change based on this interactive dynamic.



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Fiction writers and journalists, therefore, conceived of a larger community when they spoke of a singular “reading public,” even if they were aware of the fallacies of this construction. When their subject matter was the group, they also contributed to definitions about the mob, managed collective, nation and the individual. John Plotz has convincingly shown that literary depictions of the crowd in the first half of the century were “central to the representational struggles that define the British public sphere,”84 but Victorian fiction also contained other manifestations of assemblies as shaping the public sphere. In the second half of the century, novelists’ depictions of and journalists’ comments on musical groups (audiences, ensembles, mass-music movements) were powerful contributors to definitions of the public sphere, not least because aesthetics (musical, literary) could and did exert a shaping force on the public realm. The issue is complex; far from being a coherent narration, professional music journals and fictional works differ in the stories that they tell about musical groups, the position of the individual within or outside these collectives, and the comment all this makes about the nation and public sphere. Professional music critics orient themselves toward a community of readers who are also interested in promoting an ideal standard of musical repertoire and performance practices. Rather than being an upper-class movement at large (because the elite were criticized for their own behavior), shaping the audience into a rationally-engaged collective was the province of a mostly professional, intellectual, and artistic class comprising clergy, church musicians, music teachers, academics, and other music professionals and serious amateurs who formed the readership for both the Proceedings of the Musical Association (PMA) and the Musical Times (which became the leading Victorian music journal under Lunn’s care).85 And, as Habermas reports, scholarly journals deal in opinions in a way that the commercial press does not: they practice a “literary journalism” where individuals put their “critical-rational reflections” into print.86 However, their commentaries are just one community’s discussion about musical groups. Fiction adds to the fray by depicting musical audiences in ways differing from the journalists’ ideals; concert scenes in literature add to understandings of concertgoing etiquette, but they are also put to aesthetic use. By “aesthetic” I intend Ludwig Wittgenstein’s differentiation between the aesthetic and nonaesthetic realms whereby “[a] work of art forces” its audience to feel while nonaesthetic objects or events do not have the same agency. Rather, in the latter, the observer decides whether to regard the experience enthusiastically or “coldly.”87 In other words, literature



Introduction


provides a different account of music-making practices, collectivity, and the public sphere than does critical-rational prose; while fiction writers create aesthetic experiences, journalists’ comments, even when they are about aesthetic experience, will not necessarily move us. Instead, they are at least partially educational because they promote ideals to be followed, and the reader decides whether to find the ideas worthy of emulation. Then again, it is worth remembering that there was overlap between aesthetic and rational-critical works in nineteenth-century Europe. As I explore in Hector Berlioz’s music criticism, continental reviews frequently included fictional characters, settings and plots. Composer Robert Schumann and other writers did the same in his journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik,88 as did Richard Wagner’s review short stories, including “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven” (1840) and “A Happy Evening” (1841).89 In Britain, only James W. Davison seems to have dabbled in such practices when he gave Pickwickian names and dialogue to a group of so-called “Muttonians” in his reviews for the Musical World.90 As editor for the Musical World from 1844 to 1885 and music critic for The Times from 1846 to 1878,91 Davison was hugely influential in English musical life during the third quarter of the century. However, other English music reviewers did not similarly experiment with fictional elements, nor was Davison as innovative as were French and German music critics. But while English journal writing may not have consciously merged with the aesthetic realm, fictional works included rational-critical elements, including some that verged on journalistic criticism. For instance, Chapter 5 argues that Shaw’s novel Love among the Artists (1881) can be read as a critical review of London’s musical scene. I therefore agree with Plotz’s suggestion that “the literary/aesthetic sphere becomes a parallel form of public interaction, rival to the rationalcritical sphere, and equipped with its own cultural logic.”92 My argument positions literary works in terms of socio-political concerns as well as aesthetic ones, while also suggesting that fiction’s mode of communication is often different from that of a historical document or other types of print media, precisely because it is meant to move us. Moreover, fictional narratives dialogue with each other as they explore the musical crowd in disparate ways, and they also converse with other modes of discourse (e.g., music trade journals, program notes) that attempt to shape concert etiquette and performance practices through rational-critical commentary. My project integrates research on various cultural, political and scientific discourses with recent work on the musical audience and national music education initiatives, and compares these findings with scenes in fictional works by Charlotte Brontë, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens,



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Wilkie Collins, Hector Berlioz, Samuel Butler, Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas De Quincey, G.H. Lewes, George Eliot, Germaine de Staël, Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, Charles Robert Maturin, Jane Austen, Margaret Oliphant, Giovanni D. Ruffini, George Meredith, George Bernard Shaw, Vernon Lee, Mrs Humphry Ward, E.F. Benson, and E.M. Forster. Some of these prose works are discussed in depth and others in passing – the latter in order to address how fiction manipulates Romantic tropes, fits into wider Victorian context, and extends into literary modernism; the former as representative examples of how musical groups were diversely imagined. This book is not intended as an exhaustive study. Rather, many of the literary works that I concentrate on were extremely popular when published, if not bestsellers, and so spoke to their generation. Only Shaw’s novel was relatively unknown at the time, although it admirably fits the current study because of its import as a piece of musical criticism in fictional form. Indeed, I have chosen many of the fictional works because of their overlap with critical prose – an overlap which draws attention to the central role of music in aesthetic writing. There are a number of questions to which I return in the course of this book: How does fiction differ from or merge with critical-rational prose? What happens to aesthetic or literary writing when music is depicted? My selection process was not an imposition of my desire for certain results, however, for nineteenthcentury authors demonstrated awareness of a lineage of Victorian fiction using musical scenes for aesthetic purpose. Mrs Humphry Ward, for instance, brought together Charles Auchester (1853), Villette (1853), Sandra Belloni (1864) and her own Robert Elsmere (1888) to show how representing music assists the English to write novels that are poetically expressive. Music, within literary prose, is a means of addressing what musicologists commonly call “the idea of music,”93 but the fictional representation of music also serves to shift prose writing from critical argument to emotional expression and lyric persuasion. Both shorter and longer fictional works suggest the range of experimentation in prose fiction during the period, as we can see in Berlioz’s combination of music criticism with short story, and in Meredith’s replacement of the narrator’s voice in Vittoria (1867) with large portions of opera libretto. Even though the genre of the novel was at the top of the literary hierarchy during high Victorianism, shorter fictional forms were often technically innovative, too, especially in cases where they creatively combine with criticism. Perhaps this type of experimentation is unsurprising during an age when so many fiction writers were also producing a wide range of articles in professional and family journals.



Introduction


Literary criticism today has largely overlooked the theoretic possibilities that emerge when examining concepts of music within Victorian prose. Doing so results in novel readings of now canonical and noncanonical authors. Besides innovations in prose writing, there are traceable cultural thematics in relation to music’s intersection with other discourses. Nineteenth-century England was acutely aware of the influence of sensation, for instance, but literary scholarship largely ignores the fact that music provides a nexus for a range of ideas about sensibility, from fears about emotional responsiveness to a rational understanding of the organization of musical sound, ranging from Hermann von Helmholtz’s breakthroughs in acoustics to educational initiatives that taught a rudimental understanding of compositional structure to concertgoers.94 Moreover, ideas about the shaping influence of culture within the nation were constructed through listening, as well as through reading and “the gaze.” While the concept of connections between music and nation is not new to musicologists, the topic has not been investigated in terms of the wide range of discourses that I examine, nor has it been explored through the lens of fiction. Besides contributing to literary scholarship, the current project looks at an array of ideas that are suggestive for further work in musicology. Victorian fiction places music in social, cultural and political context, which highlights areas of intersection that can then be applied back to an understanding of the music itself. For instance, a theme traced in this book is the link between geography, climate theory and music, which may rework how musicologists look at the common association of Elgar with English rural landscape.95 Similarly, while the philosophies of John Ruskin, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer are recognized ways of understanding music aesthetics and compositional aims in Victorian Britain, Matthew Arnold’s thoughts about culture and ethnology have received no critical attention in studies of the English Musical Renaissance. The oversight is potentially significant, for studying the implications of Arnold’s theories may change how we examine the influx of Celtic elements in late nineteenth-century English music, or even general ideas about expressing Englishness in music. When we realize that Arnold was the first to introduce the concept that the English were not only racially Teutonic, but also Celtic, we may find music that introduced Celtic elements at the turn of the century to convey ideas about Englishness as well as beliefs about the Celtic fringe. Moreover, Arnold’s definition of the English spirit as being “energy with honesty,”96 may have been expressed in musical form by those composers interested in nationalism. In contemplating George Frideric Handel’s continued popularity among the English masses, prominent music critic



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Joseph Bennett suggested in 1877 that “there exists some degree of affinity between his music and the national mind,” including qualities such as “manly strength and vigour; [ . . . ] direct, straightforward utterance.”97 “Vigour” and straightforwardness are simply synonyms for “energy with honesty.” Moreover, because composer C. Hubert H. Parry found Arnold’s Literature and Dogma (1873) and Essays in Criticism (1865) inspirational,98 an interesting lineage is established, suggesting that studying Ralph Vaughan Williams in relation to Matthew Arnold may prove especially fruitful. Not only was Vaughan Williams a student of Parry’s who was taught to “write choral music as befits an Englishman and a democrat,” but he set Arnold’s poetry (also expressive of Englishness) from as early as 1899.99 What has not been explored thus far is the possible influence of Arnold’s non-fiction prose on Parry or Vaughan Williams. Beyond simply providing information on reception history and music aesthetics, then, the project poses a number of fresh musicological queries. But rather than being an interdisciplinary splicing, which suggests two disciplines that remain essentially separate, my view is of a cohesive literary and musical Victorian England, if sometimes tautly so. Victorian understandings of nation did not rest only on a literary interpretation, or a musical, political, or scientific reading. Analyzing the period based on twentieth- and twenty-first-century models of disciplinarity misses nuances, and even large gaps, in how Victorian culture conceived itself. Therefore, while the imagined audience of this book is mostly housed today in separate university departments of literature and music, it is my hope that these disciplines will draw closer together as new critical and theoretic possibilities emerge through consideration of the sister disciplines. By working from discussions by professional musicians in Victorian trade journals and books, the present project maps how the profession was discussing musical practices of the day and then compares these findings to how fictional works depicted related phenomena. Focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Elizabeth Sara Sheppard’s Charles Auchester, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Hector Berlioz’s “Euphonia, ou la ville musicale” (1844), Chapters 1 and 2 deal with music and disciplined collectives. Chapters 3 and 4 pair two radical novels from the 1860s that discuss music as a revolutionary force: George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni and its sequel, Vittoria. The fifth and sixth chapters address fiction on the cusp between Victorianism and literary modernism – George Bernard Shaw’s Love among the Artists, Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, E.F. Benson’s Dodo (1893), Vernon Lee’s Althea (1894) and E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) – which introduce new concerns about the relation between individuals and collective society as the twentieth century dawns.



Introduction


Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Elizabeth Sara Sheppard’s Charles Auchester, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, all published in 1853, engage with a burning topic of the day: rationalist surveillance. Each novel emphasizes different attributes of surveillance, suggesting that novelists struggled with the idea of the ubiquitous gaze and what it meant in English life. Ruth depicts the negative effect of observation and discipline in the Bradshaw home, for instance, and is similar to Dickens’s novel in its sympathy toward unwed pregnancy. Both narratives accentuate moral questions, especially as unrelenting scrutiny required so-called fallen women either to conceal their deed or submit themselves to harsh social judgment. However, while Bleak House contains mysteries within its pages, Villette’s narrator and protagonist Lucy Snowe, as Sally Shuttleworth astutely observes, does not have real secrets,1 neither do the characters in Charles Auchester. Rather, these last two novels demonstrate pressures exerted on characters in crowded aesthetic spaces; the concert hall and theater are public venues that help to define and shape bourgeois identity in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Ultimately, as this chapter explores, music serves to undermine an essentially rationalist approach to the construction of society, positing the importance of the aesthetic to individual and community. It is unsurprising that mid-century fiction emphasizes surveillance, given that by the 1851 census the age seemed to be governed by the theories of the great English Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. The rise in social statistics is a good indication of the exponential increase in the inspecting, organizing and calculating of social life. As M.J. Cullen records in The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain, 1801 marked the inauguration of England’s decennial census and several statistical societies were established beginning in the early 1830s. In the field of so-called 30



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moral statistics, the government conducted surveys of school facilities in 1833, and, respectively, an educational and religious census in 1851.2 Indeed, far from only dealing with economic issues like imports and exports, social concerns like public health, crime, education, religion and prostitution were at the heart of the emerging culture of statistics.3 In other words, a wide range of lifestyle choices were surveyed, documented and mathematically interpreted with the goal of making the hidden visible and potentially subject to bureaucratic control. As Theodore M. Porter puts it: “Statistics was and continues to be seen as especially valuable for uncovering causal relationships where the individual events are either concealed from view or are highly variable and subject to a host of influences.”4 Despite its determination to reveal and represent, however, moral statistics often fell short of its ultimate goal of reformation because of the inherent ambiguity of questions of good and evil, as Mary Poovey argues in relation to the statistics of prostitution in her book, Making a Social Body.5 It is well known that the underlying philosophy for such rationalist initiatives was Benthamite Utilitarianism, a social system organized around the guiding principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” where, as Ernest Albee observes, the “Good is ‘happiness’ and ‘happiness’ is merely the sum of pleasures.”6 To be guided by pleasure is part of the ideal whereby each person acts in his or her own self-interest; the notion is of a rational order (not passion) and of material gain. Indebted to Adam Smith and laissez-faire individualism,7 Utilitarianism became linked with philosophical radicalism during the early nineteenth century, which in turn was connected to classical economics and a political economy of restricting aid to the impoverished in the hopes of making the poor more self-dependent. By the twenties, Utilitarianism overlapped in personnel and creed with radical Unitarianism, too, especially in areas such as education and poor laws.8 Bentham’s materialist system of social ordering may have been pervasive in mid-century institutional practices, but it was not without its critics. Utilitarians and anti-Utilitarians alike found fault with Bentham’s progressive system because of its antipathy toward the feeling human being, leading William Hazlitt to accuse Bentham of striking “the whole mass of fancy, prejudice, passion, sense, whim, with his petrific, leaden mace,” and reducing “the theory and practice of human life to a caput mortuum of reason, and dull, plodding, technical calculation.”9 Despite his famed Utilitarian upbringing, even J.S. Mill charged Bentham with a lack of Imagination and completeness in representing “universal human nature.”10 Having served as Bentham’s amanuensis, Mill knew the philosopher personally.11 “In many





of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its graver experiences he was altogether cut off,” Mill writes in his Autobiography (1873). “He saw accordingly in man little but what the vulgarest eye can see.”12 The younger man’s venom may well have been the result of his spiritual crisis in 1826–1827, from which he healed first through the solace of music, then of poetry; these “imaginative arts” helped him to cultivate feelings.13 Yet despite his cutting opinion of extreme rationality and abstract reasoning, Mill maintained a modified Utilitarian outlook throughout his life, combining logic with an idealism that he found in Coleridge’s writings. The ramifications of Benthamite Utilitarianism extend beyond general humanist considerations to embrace aesthetic and spiritual concerns, too. The archenemy of Benthamite thought, Thomas Carlyle, sustained a vehement attack against “the monster UTILITARIA”14 during his lifetime. Although his passionate outcry is softened in the affectionate letters exchanged with his friend Mill in the early thirties, Carlyle nonetheless identifies how even modified Utilitarianism emphasizes rationality above feeling, soul and religion: “the creed you write down is singularly like my own in most points, – with this single difference, that you are not yet consciously nothing of a Mystic; your very Mysticism (for there is enough of it in you) you have to translate into Logic before you give it place.”15 Carlyle’s criticism of Utilitarianism concentrates on its lack of spirituality. But as John Whale shrewdly remarks when examining Bentham, it is because both aesthetics and religion share similar ground: Like Malthusian population theory, Benthamite radicalism represented a threat to the soul of man. By redefining aesthetics according to a minutely graded calculus of pain and pleasure applied to the social abstract of the general good Bentham questioned some of the most sacred tenets of liberal individualism. He challenged the very possibility of altruism and philanthropy operating as adequate motives in human behaviour. [ . . . ] At the same time as critiquing traditional religious belief therefore, Bentham also challenged the capacity of traditional aesthetics to occupy the hinterland of moral pleasure. He ruled out religious hope at the same time as he derided the possibility of aesthetics providing some spiritual compensation.16 Obviously, such ideas about the utility of aesthetics were uncomfortable, if not alarming, to creative people. Moreover, given that Charlotte Brontë’s politics were High Tory and very much against the kind of radicalism that appealed to followers of Bentham, it is unsurprising that her aesthetic prose probes the tension between rationality and feeling.



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Besides his ideas about imaginative writing, Bentham’s thoughts about surveillance are crucial to my consideration of how 1850s novels assess rationalist observation. Most readers familiar with Foucault’s study of incarceration, Discipline and Punish (1975), will speak of surveillance and Bentham’s ideal model of the prison in the same breath. In brief, the Panopticon’s architectural style, with its central watchtower, promoted an unrelenting sense of being watched – a disciplinary mechanism that Foucault associates with emerging modern strategies of judgment and power. Probably because his project is to trace these features of modernity, however, Foucault ignores the then-contemporary concerns voiced about the Panopticon. In reality, thinkers of the day did not necessarily subscribe to Bentham’s system as desirable or even effective in managing individuals, much less an entire society. Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age (2nd edn, 1825) describes how Mr Bentham takes a culprit, and puts him into what he calls a Panopticon, that is, a sort of circular prison, with open cells, like a glass beehive. He sits in the middle, and sees all the other does. He gives him work to do, and lectures him if he does not do it. He takes liquor from him, and society and liberty; but he feeds and clothes him, and keeps him out of mischief; and when he has convinced him, by force and reason together, that this life is for his good, he turns him out upon the world a reformed man, and as confident of the success of his handy-work, as [ . . . ] the Parisian barber in Sterne, of the buckle of his wig. “Dip it in the ocean,” said the perruquier, “and it will stand!” But we doubt the durability of our projector’s patchwork. Will our convert to the great principle of Utility work when he is from under Mr Bentham’s eye, because he was forced to work when under it?17 Hazlitt’s objections to the Panopticon ultimately suggest that societies cohere not because of “punishment or discipline,” but rather because of “sympathy.”18 The notion of sympathy recalls Mill, who yoked together imagination and feeling in his Autobiography: through Imagination “one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another” and “[t]his power constitutes the poet.”19 The belief that imagination is crucial for developing sympathy between people not only runs counter to a common historicist critique of Romantic Imagination as playing into individualism rather than recognizing political and historical orientation,20 but it was later developed by Victorian crowd theorists in order to account for how social unity occurs. In other words, imagination in Romantic aesthetic





theory not only denotes an expression or projection of the artist’s own feelings, but it also has a social configuration. Imagination’s role in building sympathy is the connection missing from Bentham’s problematic ideas regarding how egotistic people can be made to follow the leader; it suggests another model for how individuals can be fulfilled participants within a functioning community. It makes sense then that mid-century novelists concerned themselves with the role of the creative personality within a rational society. On the one hand, ideas associated with imagination offered an opposing argument to Utilitarianism’s theories about social cohesion. On the other hand, artistic people had to deal with a unique set of pressures in terms of the community’s regulating gaze and their own internal monitoring. Jenny Bourne Taylor concisely defines these issues when she discusses moral management: “ ‘Self-control’ might predominantly mean the internalization of another’s regulating gaze, a self-objectification within the subject, but the term could nonetheless be claimed in a struggle for self-definition and autonomy in the face of established power.”21 “Moral management” specifically refers to issues of mental illness and nervous disease, but in mid-Victorian Britain anyone might succumb to madness if not carefully watched.22 John Conolly, an influential figure in the medical establishment, popularized the belief that insanity would occur as long as passion overturned reason, and sanity would be reinstated when rational judgment returned.23 Villette engages with these matters as Lucy Snowe struggles against the middle-class ideal of rational calm; her self-development is positioned in opposition to social repressions and constraints. In contrast, as I show in the next chapter, Charles Auchester reveals the absolute authority of the internalized gaze, which we can see when the eponymous protagonist absorbs social influences to the point of becoming a professor who himself spreads the doctrine. Yet despite their different conclusions, the two 1853 novels come together in demonstrating how understandings of music fit mid-Victorian notions of social management and also how the creative self was constructed as a site of excitements and energetic surges that were considered pathological by the medical establishment. The idea that the self comprises physiological and psychological components is now a standard approach to canonical Victorian literature, yet the aesthetic influence and social role of music in constructing bourgeois identity suggests fresh insights. But before I turn to an extended discussion of Villette, I want to situate the novel within the context of other fictional responses to Benthamism, focusing on the place of music and aesthetic prose style within these narratives.



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Given the mid-century emphasis on fact-finding, novels of the late 1840s and early 1850s unsurprisingly wrestled with the problems of trying to find and validate the significance of feelings and the aesthetic in a world that seemed ground down by rationalist surveillance. Criticisms of Benthamite principles in fictional works began as early as Dickens’s Oliver Twist’s (1837) denouncement of the 1834 New Poor Law, continued in Disraeli’s political novels Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845), persisted in Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), and were of concern in several novels appearing in 1853. The idea of beauty, imagination and feeling as part of community building were directly opposed to Bentham’s philosophy – a feature of industrial novels that Catherine Gallagher also acknowledges in her pioneering monograph, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction.24 The place of music in discussions about Utilitarian and anti-Utilitarian social constructions, however, has not been a subject of critical investigation. It is an unfortunate oversight, for the topic traces the coming together of complex thoughts about bourgeois collectivity, individuality, rational scrutiny and sympathetic responsiveness in mid-century fictional works. While I am not concentrating at great length on the novel most associated with Utilitarianism, Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), it is useful to recall that music is opposed to the Utilitarian creed of intimidating “Facts” in this and other industrial narratives. In Dickens’s novel, appropriately dedicated to the anti-Utilitarian Carlyle, it is the “clashing and banging band”25 that first heralds the presence of the circus, a way of life so opposed to Utilitarianism that the circus child, Sissy Jupe, never masters the factual educational system of industrial, red-brick Coketown. To Gradgrind and Bounderby, the monstrous champions of “Fact,” music is not an accidental companion to “low” life (67) in this novel. It is also the subject of the “tabular statements” of the “chaplain of the jail” whose calculations show “that the same people would resort to low haunts, hidden from the public eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined in it” (67; original emphasis). The chaplain’s observations align with Victorian statistical practices that sought to expose the “hidden” and aspired to objectivity despite often questionable collection practices,26 and also with Bentham’s prejudices against fiction and music. To the rationalist Bentham, imaginative processes created “fictions” rather than truths. As Whale demonstrates, writing designed to “tickle the ear, or dazzle the imagination”27 created a rhetorical mode that Bentham attacked for its promotion of manner over matter, dangerous sensuality over plain reason.28 Hard Times suggests that such a stance is far too simplistic,



Industrial fiction and music


because, as Gallagher argues, invention is employed by Benthamites and anti-Benthamites alike. To Gallagher, the circus is the ultimate embodiment of “Fancy”29 in the novel, with the circus master turning one thing into another, as when he rescues Tom Gradgrind at the end of the novel through disguising him. This plot device is echoed in the language of the novel, which Gallagher identifies as glutted with metaphor – that figure of speech which transforms two unlike things into replacements for each other.30 Bounderby, however, also pretends to be that which he is not, as when he denies that he is his mother’s son.31 From this perspective, the narrative thus deconstructs the strict opposition between Fact and Fancy that Bentham fervently argued for, instead following Carlyle’s theory of the ironic potential of symbols, whereby a symbol can eventually come to mean its opposite.32 Similarly, the novel’s use of music expresses an anti-Benthamite stance. Bentham’s distrust of “fiction” extended from a suspicion of language (with its multiple referents) into the fine arts, most often exemplified by his denouncement of poetry and music as less truthful than a game of pushpin: Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few. The game of push-pin is always innocent: it were well could the same be always asserted of poetry. Indeed, between poetry and truth there is a natural opposition: false morals, fictitious nature. The poet always stands in need of something false. When he pretends to lay his foundations in truth, the ornaments of his superstructures are fictions; his business consists in stimulating our passions, and exciting our prejudices.33 The fine arts are only useful if people find pleasure in them and because many do not, their utility is limited. While Bentham’s pronouncement on poetry is infamous to students of literature, what is less recognized is that he constructs music as poetry’s companion in “false morals”; their “moral utility” is not that artistic pursuits are uplifting, but rather that for those suffering from ennui they provide “excellent substitutes” or near equivalents for war, “drunkenness, slander, and the love of gaming.”34 The narrator of Hard Times disagrees with pronouncements such as these, suggesting instead that imagination, feeling and music lead to improvement in industrial communities: Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the case of the Coketown population and the case of the little Gradgrinds? Surely, none of us in our sober sense and acquainted with figures, are



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to be told at this time of day, that one of the foremost elements in the existence of the Coketown working people had been for scores of years, deliberately set at nought? [ . . . ] That exactly in the ratio as they worked long and monotonously, the craving grew within them for some physical relief – some relaxation, encouraging good humour and good spirits, and giving them a vent – some recognized holiday, though it were but for an honest dance to a stirring band of music – (68–9) Music as a “vent” to the regulated working day, rather than being limited to low wage earners as was more usual, is here applied across the classes of a single community – from Coketown laborers to the bourgeois Gradgrind children. Moreover, although domestic music-making is generally designated part of the private sphere, in Dickens’s novel parlor music ultimately serves social purpose. As Louisa Gradgrind states to her brother Tom, “I often sit wondering here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can’t reconcile you to home better than I am able to do. [ . . . ] I can’t play to you, or sing to you” (91). Giving pleasure through imaginative release builds community at home, provides a necessary relief to otherwise unrelenting material production, and may prevent crime. Had Louisa played and sung, she may have helped to avert Tom’s later bank robbery, since the descent into criminality was a common critique of Utilitarianism, appearing in writings from Dickens to Disraeli and Butler. As Disraeli proclaimed, “the Utilitarian only admits one or two of the motives that influence man; a desire of power and a desire of property; and therefore infers that it is the interest of man to tyrannize, and to rob.”35 Put another way, as J.K. Fielding articulates in an article on Oliver Twist, if everyone is out for self-preservation and self-interest rather than being motivated by generosity, then what would stop individuals from making the degenerating plunge into criminal activity?36 Not only is music’s social purpose emphasized in Hard Times, but it is also paired with the craft of fiction writing – just as Bentham matches the two, but to different purpose. At the beginning of Chapters 5 and 8 (“The Key-note,” “Never Wonder”) the narrator repeats himself almost verbatim: “Let us strike the key-note again, before pursuing the tune” (89). The “key-note” is identified as the novel’s themes of “Coketown” (65), reason, and fact, while the “tune” is obviously the unfolding story. With these statements, the narrator emphasizes the process of writing, revealing the seams as he stitches together the novel. Directly comparing fiction writing and music composition suggests that even though the novel is about reason and fact, the narrator fancifully considers it to be tune-like in structure. Given Bentham’s distrust of music and fiction, Hard Times essentially undercuts its Utilitarian subject not only through




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what happens (plot), but also in how it is told (narrative choices) – features that are also found in Villette.

Before we start analyzing Villette, we need to remember that music’s social role was largely perceived to be class-specific at the time. The current study’s focus on music-making grows out of more general perceptions of the period as crucial in “the development of ideas about the relationship between culture and class in Britain,” as Helen Small writes, “one in which the middle-classes [sic] exerted and consolidated unprecedented control over the cultural sphere.”37 It is commonly known that the middle classes “helped” the working classes in the turbulent 1830s and 1840s through initiating certain approved “self”-help and leisure activities, or “rational recreation.” These activities were often educational and were instigated in the factories, alongside improvements in ventilation, lighting, cleanliness and diet. Music education was frequently included with other educational campaigns, as when Sir David Barry reported that the New Lanark mills paid great attention to schooling the workers’ children in “reading, writing, with the elements of geography, music, dancing, natural history.” The children even performed a “quadrille in the very best style” for Barry’s visit in 1833.38 The “music for the people” movement included the sight-singing initiatives that I discussed in the Introduction and was a rising force of rational recreation, “self”-help, and ethical improvement in the late forties and early fifties. This system required not only introducing certain behaviors to a lower class, but also the internalization of a belief system by the people, whereby they found value in engaging in these so-called philanthropic activities. Success was made to seem a responsibility of the individual (“self”-control), rather than coercion by an external power. Thus psychological theories shared with Victorian economic ideologies a foundation in notions of people as free agents who controlled their destinies.39 As the laboring classes were making a type of group music that assisted a larger process of class integration, the middle and upper classes simultaneously experienced musical performance as constructing individualism: they attended concerts to display high social status through fancy dress and high-priced seating. Certainly, listening practices gradually shifted around this time to a greater focus on the music,40 but there was also new middle-class emphasis on attending musical events to see and be seen. By now, London, Paris and Vienna concert-goers had become accustomed to reserving expensive seats instead of jostling together in general admission.41 Issues of concert etiquette began to be noted with concern in the



Villette

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Musical Times and, as the introduction showed, music journalists expressed annoyance about disruptive audience behavior. While Charles Auchester engages with passionate music as important to social construction across the classes, Villette focuses on individualism versus collective identity within the bourgeoisie. In keeping with this class orientation, Villette not only depicts disruptive audience behavior as normal, but it also neglects to include the negative reaction of performers or musical journalists to audience members who talk during the concert. Brontë’s novel represents the experiences of a class with different motivations to attending musical events than the ideals that British and continental music critics were trying to shape. Thus Villette provides historical information about concert attendance, but it uses the audience scenes to aesthetic purpose, too, because they happen at pivotal points, when discovery, crisis, and resolution occur in the lives of protagonist Lucy Snowe and physician Dr John. These scenes are important for understanding how Villette develops the idea of an individual’s personal growth as emotionally responsive, and as occurring under, and chaffing against, the public eye. In a narrative that repeatedly returns to the theme of surveillance, audience scenes are important for turning the opera glass on the watching audience and their performance of polite society’s norms and restrictions. “Identity,” as Shuttleworth maintains in her fine study of Brontë’s fiction, “is not a given, but rather a tenuous process of negotiation between the subject and surrounding social forces.”42 This negotiation occurs in Brontë’s final novel as Lucy struggles to respond rationally and aesthetically to the activities on stage. Discussion with other audience members serves to identify Lucy’s struggle as she engages feelingly with artistic sensation – a response that is considered dangerously pathological and contradictory to the rational-critical mode of public life and bourgeois identity espoused by Dr John. At this point, it is makes sense to outline the intriguing plot of what is a truly haunting novel. Villette concerns the fortunes of narrator and protagonist Lucy Snowe, but in extremely unusual ways. The novel’s preoccupation with a highly individualized consciousness results in a story intrigued by filtered experiences, misrepresentations, and near hallucinations. As Heather Glen recognizes, while other novelists of the day confidently describe environment and social experiences, Lucy’s vision is so “limited, disturbed, bedazzled, occluded” as not only to be sometimes inaccurate, but also to convey the impression that she experiences the world as “an aggressive assault of the eye.”43 The characterization makes a strong departure from the reliable narration of Brontë’s earliest novel heroine, Jane Eyre. The first pages depict Lucy’s brief residence with Mrs Bretton (Lucy’s godmother) and her adolescent son, John Graham Bretton. Also present





is the child Polly Home, who forms a passionate attachment to Graham, resulting in an emotional turbulence that Lucy criticizes. While Lucy favors calm, scholars usually recognize that her reaction to Polly is a projection of Lucy’s own hidden emotional life.44 A few years later, the adult Lucy travels to Labassecour (meaning poultry-yard or pigsty). In this fictionalized Belgium, Lucy is employed at Madame Beck’s Pensionnat de Damoiselles, first as governess to Madame Beck’s children and then as the school’s English teacher. The protagonist mostly isolates herself, except for an uneasy friendship with the flighty student, Ginevra Fanshawe, but her seclusion becomes extreme once the long summer vacation arrives. Left alone at school, she collapses mentally and is taken home by the school’s doctor. Lucy’s hosts are revealed to be the Brettons and she finds happiness living with them and attending a concert and the theater. At the latter, she and Dr John unexpectedly encounter Polly and her father, the Count de Bassompierre. Lucy returns to work once the new academic year commences, suffering when Dr John’s attention turns toward Polly, but then falling in love with the choleric Monsieur Paul Emanuel. Jealous Madame Beck arranges to ship M. Paul overseas, and on the night before his supposed sailing, our protagonist resists Madame Beck for the first time as she waits vainly to say goodbye. Lucy is rewarded for her insurgency with a sedative of opium, which excites rather than calms her. At the climax of the novel, the narcotic prompts her to wander to a crowded park where she attends an outdoor concert and witnesses a short replay of most of the novels’ characters and events. Subsequently, Paul declares his love and sets up Lucy in her own school while he is overseas. Upon sailing home, Paul encounters a storm and the final pages are written so obliquely as to suggest two possible endings: either Paul has drowned or the lovers have reunited. Instead of finishing with the traditional Victorian marriage plot, the conclusion of the story is left untied, a condition that echoes how Lucy moves through social spaces. In Villette, audience scenes move from rational order to passionate disorder in terms of Lucy’s reaction to the events; she increasingly rebels against the bourgeois norm, as noticed by critics such as Mary Jacobus and Terry Lovell.45 Not only does Villette’s ending present a variation on a conventional plot to the reading public (an ending written by Lucy as narrator and Brontë as author), but the events leading up to this ending also trace Lucy’s increasingly individual interaction with the public (the audiences at artistic events). She gradually slips loose of the reins of socialized responses, experiences individualized reactions to aesthetic performances, and then writes about them for another aesthetic audience: the readers. Writing a new story to circulate in public simply



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duplicates a process begun by Lucy within the novel’s pages, and it is proposed by the narrator with some unease.

The first concert in the novel establishes the bourgeois and aristocratic norm of concert going: well-educated audience members appreciate the musical performance as an elite event, one where you dress up and see acquaintances and famous personalities. Lucy wears a colorful new dress to a concert that “was a grand affair to be held in the large salle, or hall of the principal musical society. The most advanced of the pupils of the Conservatoire were to perform: it was to be followed by a lottery ‘au bénéfice des pauvres;’ [to benefit the poor] and to crown all, the King, Queen, and Prince of Labassecour were to be present.”46 Despite Lucy’s educated status, she admits: “On the concert I need not dwell; the reader would not care to have my impressions thereanent [relating thereto]: and, indeed, it would not be worth while to record them, as they were the impressions of an ignorance crasse [abysmally ignorant]” (292). While this statement might be read as truly indicating lack of musical knowledge, the fact is that most women of Lucy’s background had some musical training.47 Moreover, feeling ignorant is a recurring character trait: Lucy embarks on life abroad where she knows neither Labassecour’s language nor its customs, is given teaching tasks that she feels unprepared for, and, as Tony Tanner explores, progresses through various new social spaces, domestic and public, where she feels alienated from society.48 Trepidation at appearing in new finery and her impression of musical ignorance, however, do not negate Lucy’s excitement at attending the concert, which she naively describes as “the fresh gala feeling with which an opera or a concert is enjoyed by those for whom it is a rarity.” “I am not sure,” she adds, “that I expected great pleasure from the concert, having but a very vague notion of its nature, but I liked the drive there well” (284). Lucy’s responses, then, are based on her education, but not on the idea that she is necessarily musically literate; she does not regularly attend concerts and operas, but nonetheless shares behavioral norms with other audience members. At the concert, listening is less important than the gaze, an orientation that fits the theme of surveillance in the novel. The educational establishments in both Brontë’s first published novel, Jane Eyre (1847), and Villette operate under a system of group discipline that fits post-Enlightenment modes of institutional management. This system includes a hierarchy of disciples who extend education and surveillance beyond what one person alone is capable of achieving. In Villette, Madame Beck establishes a



The civic concert


“system for managing and regulating” and this system, described with political metaphors, includes Benthamite surveillance, a “staff of spies,” “constraint” and “rational benevolence,” balanced with amusements, exercise and a healthy diet (135, 136, 137). In her discussion of “Gender and Englishness in Villette,” Lovell convincingly suggests the presence of discourses such as François de Salignac de la Motte-Fenelon’s The Education of Girls (1687), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational ideals, and Palmerston’s Police Bills (1854, 1856) in Villette’s educational strategies. My reading, however, departs from her implication that Benthamism is not referenced in the novel.49 Instead of the suspicion of “ ‘un-English’ practice[s]”50 that Lovell posits, I believe that the narrative probes the nature of rationalist surveillance in general, including English modes of observation like Benthamism. After all, Dr John watches, too. As demonstrated below in terms of Dr John’s scrutiny of Lucy in subsequent audience scenes, the hierarchy of disciples includes not only Madame Beck’s employees, but also Dr John and other members of the public who attempt to regulate behavior through public observation. In Villette, institutional control is extended to performers as well as the audience. For example, Lucy observes M. Paul, who vies with Madame Beck for managerial prowess, organizing the student performers: The stage, [ . . . ] was now overflowing with life; round two grand pianos, placed about the centre, a white flock of young girls, the pupils of the Conservatoire, had noiselessly poured. I had noticed their gathering, while Graham and his mother were engaged in discussing the belle in blue satin, and had watched with interest the process of arraying and marshalling them. Two gentlemen, in each of whom I recognized an acquaintance, officered this virgin troup. One, an artistic looking man, bearded, and with long hair, was a noted pianiste, and also the first music teacher in Villette; [ . . . ] his name was M. Josef Emanuel, and he was half-brother to M. Paul: which potent personage was now visible in the person of the second gentleman. M. Paul amused me; I smiled to myself as I watched him, he seemed so thoroughly in his element – standing conspicuous in presence of a wide and grand assemblage, arranging, restraining, over-aweing about one hundred young ladies. He was, too, so perfectly in earnest – so energetic, so intent, and, above all, so absolute: and yet what business had he there? What had he to do with music or the Conservatoire – he who could hardly distinguish one note from another? I knew that it was his love of display and authority which had brought him there – a love not offensive, only because so naïve. It presently became obvious



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Even though the students later perform as soloists or in duets, they are grouped together under the terms “flock” and “troup,” undifferentiated as individuals, being simply a color (“white”) or a quality (“virgin”). The military lexicon suggests a comparison with other institutions that managed groups with precision and demonstrates that pre-concert organization is a display in its own right. Lucy, after all, watches the “arranging, restraining, over-aweing” more attentively than the performance itself. Indeed, the management of the arriving performers is more successful than the actual performance: The young ladies of the Conservatoire, being very much frightened, made rather a tremulous exhibition on the two grand pianos. M. Josef Emanuel stood by them while they played; but he had not the tact or influence of his kinsman, who, under similar circumstances, would certainly have compelled pupils of his to demean themselves with heroism and self-possession. M. Paul would have placed the hysteric débutantes between two fires – terror of the audience, and terror of himself – and would have inspired them with the courage of desperation, by making the latter terror incomparably the greater: M. Josef could not do this. (292–3; original emphasis) Lucy believes that stern leadership is required for conservatory students, similar to the methods of Madame Beck’s educational institution. These musicians are performing a sort of examination or public display of their skills, similar to other public demonstrations by Madame Beck’s students. They are obedient, but unable to reach their potential without an overseer who can control them and their emotions (through “terror”). What is missing is an element of passionate musicianship, as occurs in most of the other novels that I examine. Rather, this scene emphasizes power exerted over students and, given the king’s presence, becomes by extension a display of obedient citizenry. At this point, Lucy seems in agreement that all is copasetic: she focuses on exerting will, being rational and remaining calm. From the opening pages, Lucy watches and negatively judges others’ emotional displays. Accordingly, the concert description emphasizes her perceptions of the grand hall, that they sit “in places commanding a good general view” (286) of the audience, and a mode of listening that might fit James Parakilas’s notion of “divided attention,” which he proposes in relation to eighteenthcentury audiences.51



that his brother, M. Josef, was as much under his control as were the girls themselves. (288–9)


To explain what Parakilas means, it is necessary to realize that alongside the rise of the middle classes in the 1830s and 1840s, nineteenth-century musical audiences were increasingly meant to watch and listen silently, as opposed to the eighteenth century when talking and walking about during the performance was common and even expected.52 This behavior did not mean that eighteenth-century audiences were not sometimes expected to be quiet, that they did not take music seriously, or that they were always inattentive. Rather, a changing social system with different behavioral norms was in place. William Weber has noted that before the middle of the nineteenth century, audiences at concerts and operas were members of a tightly knit, upper-class community who commonly socialized in a variety of public venues, rather than in private homes. In a single evening they would traverse between several sites, such as the opera, theater and coffee house. Moreover, Weber reports that there were different expectations regarding how concert-going experiences were discussed by eighteenth-century elites: they may have denied that they listened at the opera, but this disavowal does not necessarily represent what actually occurred. Some people paid attention – a point evident in the fact that libretti were sold at the door and individuals followed along. But there was an abhorrence among gentility of speaking in “excessively serious terms,” so they downplayed their attentiveness.53 In other venues, silence was expected, as Simon McVeigh proves with the example of the Castle Society in the City of London, which, in the middle of the eighteenth century, used fines to enforce quiet at their performances of vocal and instrumental repertoire.54 Moreover, Parakilas suggests a notion deriving from modern psychology, where “divided attention” or “half-listening” may account for a way in which these earlier audiences were able to pay attention to the music even as they “conversed, played cards, or peered into neighboring boxes.”55 While Parakilas uses the case of watching television while “roaming the house” to support his hypothesis instead of examples from the period, the idea is still plausible, especially given how novels like Villette depict divided attention: “Through the whole performance – timid instrumental duets, conceited vocal solos, sonorous, brass-lunged choruses – my attention gave but one eye and one ear to the stage,” Lucy narrates, “the other being permanently retained in the service of Dr Bretton” (293). Her divided attention allows Lucy to converse with Dr John during the concert, to label the performers pejoratively, and to remain impassive to the music. Given her tendency toward observation, Lucy’s response might be read as characteristic of her personality rather than as depicting a more bourgeois response to concerts, if it were not for other characters’ expectations.



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“And how do you like it all, Lucy? You are very quiet,”[ . . . ] “I am quiet,” I said, “because I am so very, very much interested: not merely with the music, but with everything about me.” (293–4; original emphasis) Lucy’s silence demonstrates engagement with the entire social “event” more than with the musical works or performers. This behavior fits eighteenth-century norms of eschewing emotional responses to music. What follows is a lengthy, two-page conversation about how Dr John was observed by rude Ginevra in the royal box. He and Lucy do not disrupt the audience at large because they converse “under cover” of a “thundering” chorus. However, some individuals are trying to listen to the concert, as Dr John’s mother demonstrates in requesting quiet so that she can “hear the singing” (296). By ignoring her request, Dr John shows that while his mother may personally desire to listen, he does not view his conduct as a social faux pas. Indeed, his mother even allows herself to be drawn into the repartee, demonstrating that she had been quietly listening not because it was expected concert etiquette, but because she simply wanted to hear. Besides attending a concert for musical pleasure and visual exhibition, the concert hall is valuable as part of the public sphere; it is a place to socialize, flirt and converse. But while the civic concert establishes the norm of bourgeois behavior at public venues, it also implicitly comments on that norm through a metaphoric consideration of the (diseased) body politic. Despite the royal presence, the audience is not attentive and submissive to the monarch. Rather, the audience itself is the focus as Lucy and Dr John concentrate on the flighty Ginevra Fanshawe’s behavior. However, as Tanner observes, the Labasscour King is neither Lucy’s nor the Brettons’ ruler,56 so the British might be excused for not being subdued. The scene runs even deeper, however, for Lucy is initially attentive to the royals. It is she who sees that the king suffers from “constitutional melancholy” (290; emphasis mine), while the aristocracy and bourgeoisie of Labassecour are not “struck or touched” by the “mournful and significant” spectacle of their monarch. Even the physician Dr John misses the diagnosis, which was probably real enough since Leopold, King of the Belgians is a likely source for the King of Labassecour.57 It is an important point for, as Helen Small recognizes, there is a parallel in Brontë’s thinking between national and personal health, similar to the concept of insanity inspired by revolution in George Man Burrows’s 1828 medical book, Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral



Dr John finds Lucy’s silence during the concert unnatural, for instance, believing it to indicate unhappiness:


and Medical, of Insanity, and even the plague metaphors in Edmund Burke’s anti-Jacobin treatise of 1790, Reflections on the Revolution in France.58 A letter written in 1848 notes Brontë’s attitude toward the “sense of life, both in nations and individuals” during revolution: “it appears to me that insurrections and battles are the acute diseases of nations, and that their tendency is to exhaust, by their violence, the vital energies of the countries where they occur.”59 In Villette, perhaps standing for a wider political disease, the King’s “vital energies” appear depleted: he hardly responds to his Queen’s cheering comments and even though two “officer-like men” (297) converse with him at the interval, a sphere of robust debate hardly surrounds the monarch, especially in comparison to the more energetic activity of the other audience members. Generally, the concert hall is a site of ineffective leadership as, in a parallel to the subdued King, it is feeble M. Josef who ultimately stands by the performing conservatory students, instead of the effective M. Paul. Watching others in public unveils truths about personalities and systems of government (of state and self). While Dr John began the evening in “homage” (295) to Ginevra, his servitude ends when he catches her sneering at his mother. His and Lucy’s conversation focuses on his disillusionment of the woman whom he thought “divine” (295) – a parallel with Lucy’s thoughts about her first glimpse of European royalty. The concert as a site where people are not only seen but revealed fuels the plot since it liberates Dr John in time for Polly’s appearance. The event is therefore important for narrative development, but it also reveals how shallow Dr John and his critical-rational system are because he so easily discards Ginevra.60 The scene sets up a contrast for Lucy’s behavior in subsequent audience scenes, which move toward a more emotional life creed – one that is portrayed positively, as more honest. In other words, while Lucy shares the King’s melancholia when she exercises firm self-control, her chronic depression lifts as the novel progresses. Thus the narrative finally criticizes not emotional excess, but rather the lack of feeling response. By extension, Villette comments not only on the effects of calm control for the individual, but also on its consequences for the public and national sphere embodied in the King. The theater In the next audience scene, the local nobility and royalty are again present at an elite public performance, this time centered on the famous actress, “Vashti.” Named for a beautiful queen from the Book of Esther who resists being sexually objectified by her husband,61 this character is one of several representations by English novelists of the passionate French actress



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Rachel, as John Stokes convincingly proposes.62 The majority of the audience responds to Vashti in ways that are directly opposed to the calm rationale of the civic concert scene, setting up a contrast that highlights Lucy’s changing emotional focus. The theater outing occurs after Lucy has returned to the Pensionnat for the new academic year. She has discovered happiness through corresponding with Dr John, but also fresh concern after she sees the nun thought to haunt the school (in reality Ginevra’s disguised suitor). While Dr John diagnoses the latter as optical illusion and nervous malady, proscribing “happiness” – a cure that Lucy finds a mockery – she nonetheless adopts a new “belief in happiness” (334). Admitting that his motivation is to ward off the nun, Dr John’s continuing letters and visits certainly increase her felicity. His efforts also promote a certain doctrine since proscribing “happiness” accords with the Utilitarian creed of pleasure as the guiding principle in life, a sustainable connection because of the other rationalist factors in the doctor’s belief system. However, Lucy responds emotionally to Dr John’s letters, experiencing love rather than a practical medical cure or Utilitarian doctrine. Therefore, by the time that Lucy attends Vashti’s performances, her state of mind differs from when she attended the civic concert. She ultimately disagrees with Dr John’s credo and names her feelings of conflict as “Reason” versus “Feeling” when she writes two responses, one of each kind, to the doctor’s letters (334). These changes are important not only for tracing Lucy’s mental state but also for understanding her authorial role since she registers her growing aesthetic responsiveness in writing. On the night when Dr John invites Lucy to the theater, the ghost has just appeared a second time to Lucy. While this fright may account for her heightened sensitivities at Vashti’s performance, what is more important is that Lucy leaves for the theatre annoyed with Dr John’s diagnosis of hallucination or “nervous malady”: “Not one bit did I believe him; but I dared not contradict: doctors are so self-opinionated, so immovable in their dry materialist views” (338). Lucy resists Dr John’s attempt to define her, suggesting that she is beginning to place a different importance on Reason versus Feeling. The disparagement between the two characters continues at the theater. Lucy’s impassioned response to the “genius” Vashti differs from Dr John’s rational-critical judgment of the “woman” Vashti. He responds to the actress with “intense curiosity” (341) and judges her “as a woman, not an artist” (342). His interest is engaged, but not his imagination as he judges her on her social utility – a materialist view that, similar to Bentham, finds artists to have no positive contribution. For Lucy, the actress’ “magnetism” (340) exerts an influence in a way that the music at the earlier concert scene did not, causing her to respond




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It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation. It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral. (338) Not being causally linked, the experience is simultaneously “marvellous” and “horrible,” and registers the individual’s reaction to the artist. Lucy may be unsure about whether to approve of Vashti’s force, but the fact is that aesthetic revelation feels extreme and complex rather than eliciting the coolness of rational observation. The two extremes of response to the same event are not resolved or synthesized in the narrative. Rather than trying to order her response and decide definitive meaning, Lucy responds with imaginative sympathy to the public performance of the actress, writing for her own public with an impassioned flare where rational syntax breaks down, as in the paragraph constructed of a single, unfinished sentence: Towards midnight, when the deepening tragedy blackened to the death scene, and all held their breath, and even Graham bit in his under lip, and knit his brow, and sat still and struck – when the whole theatre was hushed, when the vision of all eyes centred in one point, when all ears listened towards one quarter – nothing being seen but the white form sunk on a seat, quivering in conflict with her last, her worst-hated, her visibly-conquering foe – nothing heard but her throes, her graspings, breathing yet of mutiny, panting still defiance: when, as it seemed, an inordinate will, convulsing a perishing mortal frame, bent it to battle with doom and death, fought every inch of ground, sold dear every drop of blood, resisted to the latest the rape of every faculty, would see, would hear, would breathe, would live, up to, within, well nigh beyond the moment when death says to all sense and all being – (342; original emphasis) Far from producing a polished paragraph and sentence, Lucy loses sight of grammatical structure, leaving it unfinished, similar to her own lack of resolve about the conflict between Reason and Feeling. And thus the impulsive run of clauses represents her intense emotional responsiveness to an aesthetic moment, and this response in turn suggests Lucy’s changing valuation of rational judgment versus pleasure and passion. This passage therefore positions Lucy against Utilitarianism by recalling Bentham’s



imaginatively. Indeed, Lucy does not describe the royals or other audience members, focusing instead on the events on stage and her aesthetic response. In the juxtaposition of two one-sentence paragraphs, Lucy demonstrates that “revelation” is now found on stage, rather than in observing the house:

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distrust of language that is infected by human emotion. Although Bentham denounced the elegant rhetoric of eighteenth-century writers in favor of plain reason (while Lucy writes not with vaunted style but in responsiveness to the “throes” and gaspings of an actress), Lucy’s long unfinished sentence is clearly inspired by passion, not reason. Yet Lucy does not discard Reason entirely since she calmly sits still instead of joining in the rioting audience when fire breaks out. The theatre scene thus provides a further divide, not just between Dr John and Lucy, but also between the English and the excitable continental audience. As noted above, the theater, along with the concert hall, opera house, coffee house and museum, was one of the public venues frequented by members of polite society, and conversation during performances was accepted behavior.63 But Lucy’s description of the actress’ influence (“magnetism”) and the riotous audience actions (“blind, selfish, cruel chaos” [342] ) demonstrates the narrator’s unease with extreme emotions, noting the physical dangers to the surrounding people (stampede) even while she writes of the power of aesthetic responsiveness to unite the social group. Certainly, “magnetism” references mesmerism and Lucy forgets for long intervals to “look at how [Dr John] demeaned himself, or to question what he thought” (340). The suggestion, given the civic concert where audience behavior was coolly rational and where Lucy was able to practice “divided listening,” is that everyone is influenced through their unconscious minds; an idea that anticipates crowd psychology later in the century. The audience seems to be in this state of mind precisely because it spontaneously erupts into a dangerous mob, stampeding out of the theater when fire breaks out. What is particularly interesting in Villette, given the mesmeric lexicon, is that the panic is depicted as dependent not so much on the leader’s occult influence as on the responsiveness of individual audience members (the English remain calm). Throughout the nineteenth century, mesmerism was often thought to disrupt individuals’ abilities to respond intellectually, a phenomenon that became evident in a similar incident several decades later when French physician Edgar Bèrillon blamed a performing mesmerizer for the dangerous stampede that ensued when he suggested that the theater was on fire.64 Of course, Bèrillon accuses an actual mesmerizer rather than examining the emotional influence of an actress, but as Chapter 6 explores, in the 1880s and 1890s actresses and musicians were perceived as potentially having a retrograde, contagious influence on the entire audience. Before the advent of crowd psychology, however, the audience members retained the ability to choose their response, even when confronted with a mesmerizing actress. Villette, then,





demonstrates a divide between Feeling and Reason, or between those who remain calm even during a riot and those who respond uncontrollably and are therefore judged pejoratively. Within the ensuing panic, Dr John sees Polly struck down by the mob. A stampede provides an opportunity for the physician to rescue someone literally injured by such irrationality, but who, like himself, is resolutely calm in the face of public disorder. However, while Dr John’s action seems to celebrate the self-control emblematized by the English bourgeoisie, it remains at best an uneasy juxtaposition to the emotional and aesthetic freedom that Lucy experienced during Vashti’s performance, especially as Lucy subsequently turns her heart from rational Dr John to volatile M. Paul. In other words, Lucy inhabits a space between: she responds to Vashti and yet sits coolly in the midst of panic. Andrew D. Hook notices that in Jane Eyre the opposition of imagination to the social duties of normal life is not resolved so much as articulated,65 but Villette does something different: it reveals extremes of social behavior (rational versus dangerously irrational) and situates Lucy between them. The outdoor concert “You think then,” I said, with secret horror, “she came out of my brain, and is now gone in there, and may glide out again at an hour and a day when I look not for her?” “I think it is a case of spectral illusion: I fear, following on and resulting from long-continued mental conflict.” (330) Lucy’s and Dr John’s pre-theatre conversation about the ghostly nun almost could be applied to the climatic scene of Villette, too, when Lucy follows vanishing “group[s] of apparitions” in a “dream-like” scene where “every shape was wavering, every movement floating, every voice echolike” (551). Similarly, her “untamed, tortured” (546) response to being denied access to M. Paul is undoubtedly “mental conflict.” Finally, the phantasmagoria unexpectedly glide out of her brain, but for good reason the second time: Madame Beck has slipped her some opium. Therefore, even though the hallucinogen’s presence leads Hook to conclude that the drug excuses Lucy’s subsequent action of following Imagination, allowing Brontë “to suggest the moral uncertainty she felt about the status of the imagination,”66 I suggest that the narcotic simultaneously amplifies and contrasts with aspects of the earlier scene. For while Lucy is disgusted by the physician’s diagnosis of “spectral illusion” when she sees the flesh-and-blood nun, the mind-altering effects of opium later cause real sights and sounds to appear illusory. The climax simply reverses



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the rationalist criticism of Lucy’s vision, instead celebrating imagination’s release through the agency of opium. Building on nineteenth-century beliefs about opium and its role in authorship, Lucy writes the climax of her autobiography as a dreamscape, where creativity reigns over rational description. Rather than suggesting that Lucy’s imagination needs excusing, Villette dovetails with mid-century commonplaces about the hallucinogen, including the role of music. Nineteenth-century theories regarding how opium might affect mental processes mostly derived from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), even though the philosopher cautioned that it was unwise to form generalizations from his work. Besides popularizing the idea that opium stimulated artistic creativity, the centrality of music in De Quincey’s formula for the writing process is striking. De Quincey believed that music itself was heard differently under the influence of opium since there is a mental component in musical responsiveness.67 Similarly, Lucy has a musical sensitivity in the park that was virtually absent in the first concert. If we follow De Quincey, then we can see that Lucy’s heightened sensibility may be accounted for by an increase in mental activity stimulated by opium. However, unlike De Quincey who then uses musical structures as a framework for his so-called impassioned prose (e.g., the “Dream-Fugue” section of “The English-Mail Coach” [1849] ), Lucy’s writing is not influenced by fugue or sonata form. Rather, opium simply assists her to write a Romantic dreamscape where sensation (sound and the vision) literally precedes realistic writing. For instance, she first sees the “strangest architectural wealth – of altar and of temple, of pyramid, obelisk, and sphynx” and only later recognizes “the material of these solemn fragments – the timber, the paint, and the pasteboard” (550). Yet in narrating the event at a later date (writing the novel), she still includes the imaginative vision before explaining the dry reality. The park/opium scene is climactic, in part, because of the complete reversal of order: sound and inner vision do not replace the gaze and Reason, but they are stronger governing forces for Lucy. In contrast to the eye that reigned supreme at the first concert, the ear leads Lucy and heralds Imagination. Soon after taking the opiate, Lucy writes: Instead of stupor, came excitement. I became alive to new thought – to reverie peculiar in colouring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons. Imagination was roused from her rest, and she came forth impetuous and venturous. (547)





The idea of opium as stimulating rather than stupefying further aligns Villette with ideas expressed in other nineteenth-century writing, from De Quincey’s Confessions to Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). More important, the “colour[ed]” reverie demonstrates that mental vision awakens alongside the inner ear, and that increased visual and aural sensibility leads to action. Soon after the passage above, Imagination depicts the center of the park where Lucy can be “lone and safe” (548). This vision is not the outward-looking gaze of surveillance, but an imaginative inner sight. Rather than restraining her, it prompts Lucy to approach the school doors and, combined with the festival music she hears, tempts her to leave: “I catch faintly from the built-out capital, a sound like bells or like a band – a sound where sweetness, where victory, where mourning blend. Oh, to approach this music nearer, to listen to it alone by the rushy basin! Let me go – oh, let me go!” (548). In yet another reversal of all that previously governed Lucy, she is unable to wander alone, finding herself “plunged amidst a gay, living, joyous crowd” (549). Lucy is powerless to observe, be still or even follow well-known routes; instead of reason, sensation guides her. This account of opium use, rather than serve as a moral excuse for Lucy’s imaginative state, is a historically accurate account of the drug’s perceived effects. Similarly, De Quincey concludes: Thus I have shown that opium does not, of necessity, produce inactivity or torpor; but that, on the contrary, it often led me into markets and theatres. Yet, in candour, I will admit that markets and theatres are not the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater, when in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment. In that state, crowds become an oppression to him; music even, too sensual and gross. He naturally seeks solitude and silence, as indispensable conditions of those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature.68 By “theater,” De Quincey means the opera house. Villette also depicts the two environments that De Quincey describes: the wandering crowds and a seated audience enjoying a musical performance. But unlike Confessions, because Lucy had experienced a concert earlier in the novel, Villette sets up a contrast between the protagonist/narrator’s rational and imaginative minds. The narrative accentuates this comparison because the same bourgeois behavioral norms of the first concert occur at this park performance: the Brettons and de Bassompierres converse, Dr John watches the audience, and there is preferred seating based on social class. Against these norms, the story shows that Lucy’s position is dynamically changed.



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While at the civic concert she was able to divide her attention between the music and her companions; at the park concert she focuses on either sound or audience. Instead of the enticement of an elite social “event,” music is now her first interest. Lucy perceives the ladies’ dresses and seating arrangements only after identifying a “wild Jager [sea-bird-like] chorus,” and then stands where “I might hear, but could see little” (552). Subsequently, more than an orientation toward seeing and being seen, Lucy’s gaze is motivated by fear of herself being observed. Although no one fixed an opera glass on Lucy at the concert hall, she remains hypersensitive to recognition in the park, insisting on anonymity when Dr John spots her and oppresses her “with the whole force of that full, blue, steadfast orb” (554). Lucy’s desire for invisibility is so great that it prevents her from concentrating on the music and she quickly leaves. If she could have remained isolated, enjoying the music but not being part of the aggregate life and joy, the implication is that she would have remained. However, attracting Dr John’s eye is now much too similar to the disciplining gaze of Madame Beck’s establishment; Lucy will not be pulled into the mistaken bourgeois definition of herself as “steady little Lucy” who enjoys music in a “grave sensible fashion; [ . . . ] so little moved, yet so content” (554). Lucy overhears these comments at the concert, and, while she is grateful to her friends for remembering her, she acknowledges that they are unaware of the pain that has “brought her out, guideless and reckless, urged and drugged to the brink of frenzy” (554). In this scene, Lucy’s reaction to opium differs from De Quincey’s free alternation between listening to opera and interacting with the London crowds. John Plotz observes that Confessions depicts how drugged individuals can be of the crowd or of music, and yet something else as well. There are multiple levels of mental activity, but overall the influence is one of sympathy in the listener.69 In Villette, however, Lucy remains outside bourgeois rationality and finds the middle-class gaze so strong that she must leave before being assimilated. Here, Lucy is not able to meld into the aesthetic experience as she did at Vashti’s performance. The power of the authoritative gaze threatens to pull her into its orbit. Just as Lucy escapes Madame Beck’s surveillance, however, she similarly wanders off when Dr John glances away. It is not only opium that helps her to escape the rigid social rules emblematized by the community gaze. Moving freely also heightens her sense of sight and sound. For example, when she found Dr John’s eyes upon her, Lucy stopped listening, but after she leaves the seating area she becomes aware of the music again. Simultaneously, Lucy becomes





once more “guideless and reckless,” allowing the crowd to direct her, “obeying the push of every chance elbow” (556). This is a spontaneous group, ungoverned by bourgeois behavioral repressions. She relaxes, finding her movements directed by the crowd because she is able to stay outside it, not drawn in by a regulating gaze. Moreover, these dismembered body parts (elbows) have no larger identity; this is not a coherent social “body,” as many nineteenth-century groups were described. Rather, the crowd consists of elbows that remain the pieces of separate people. In this teeming mass, Lucy maintains her individuality; her feeling responsiveness takes precedence over rational social identity. Music’s association with imaginative powers is of course a metaphor familiar in Romantic poetry where the Aeolian harp is synonymous with the poet, providing a powerful model for registering imaginative activities. Lucy only taps into these faculties outside the social constraints found in the audience, even if it is the elbowing crowd that moves her instead of a breeze strumming harp strings. Her external body responds to the pushes, while her internal imagination is freed. For Lucy, the urban throng replaces the natural forces of the wind brushing the harp: she experiences Romantic inner vision as she finds herself literally moved by the anonymous multitude. No longer the Lucy “so little moved” (554) in the park scene, Lucy is now moved, in both senses of the word. Even though Plotz suggests that crowds gradually become more organized in early Victorian literature as compared to the crowds depicted in Romantic writing, Villette contains two models of crowds: the Romantic crowd as spontaneous (whether as dangerous rioters in the theater or as freely flowing through the park) and the Victorian crowd as rationally oriented and managed (audiences). Lucy’s actions have a revolutionary flavor in the association of disordered crowds with the discontented populace. By resisting the organized bourgeois audiences in favor of an imaginative freedom outside of social constraints, Lucy is in a sense the Romantic writer who finds individuality outside society – a fact that is registered in her writing style about theater and park. In other words, as a writer, she steps beyond the rational-critical discourse associated with bourgeois society, and in doing so she escapes the social gaze in order to wander literally and imaginatively in the faceless crowds. The movement toward disorder – the spontaneous individual and the teeming crowds – never reaches resolution in Villette. Despite the appearance of impending peace when Lucy and Paul pledge themselves, the dual ending of Villette destroys that expectation. As Shuttleworth has noted, the readers are themselves “drawn into the turmoil” by this ending, which parallels the protagonist’s “fundamental destabilization of selfhood.”70



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We are placed in the same position that Lucy had been in: ultimately unable to resolve conflict or to sort though contradictory meanings. The reader is thus the audience to Lucy’s private story and reacts to it feelingly and aesthetically, just as Lucy increasingly responds to artistic performance in ways that extend beyond rational bourgeois norms. She rebels by having highly imaginative responses that are patently not pathological, even if they contradict the rationality of polite society and the medical establishment. Although Lucy finally escapes the institutional and bourgeois gaze in establishing her own school, by concluding the novel in a manner that causes consternation and confusion, she makes readers aware of their own emotional responsiveness to an aesthetic work and their socialized expectations of the ending. Thus as Lucy’s reaction to aesthetic events gradually becomes more personal, imaginative and aesthetic, the role and import of the novel’s audience is emphasized by extension. This novel is a form of print media that participates in a debate precisely about what the public sphere is and how to respond to it. Villette communicates a complicated vision, however, by suggesting that rational and institutional practices can act detrimentally upon the feeling individual, while still demonstrating a desire to retain some order and Utilitarian awareness. Perhaps most of all it articulates the struggle an individual feels between competing forces, with an unanswered question at the end as to whether artistic idealism and Utilitarianism can successfully wed. With this counterpoint, Brontë seems to be moving in the direction that Mill did in his essays on Bentham and Coleridge (1838; 1840): acknowledging the presence of two disparate systems of thought, Utilitarian and idealist. However, while Mill and subsequent English intellectual history attempted to discern between and then incorporate the two positions,71 Brontë’s last novel simply fictionalizes the discomfort and difficulty of their side-by-side existence for the feeling citizen, audience and artist.





[Lady Maud] identified herself with the factory system almost as much as she had done with the crusades, and longed to teach in singing schools, found public gardens, and bid fountains flow and sparkle for the people.1 Benjamin Disraeli’s Lady Maud may exhibit a rather patronizing attitude to factory workers throughout the pages of Sybil (1845), one of the most influential mid-century political novels, but the character nonetheless expresses an enthusiastic belief in the beneficial alliance between music and industrial society. She makes her comments in response to the model factory community of the novel, where singing classes are “the greatest fun we ever had” (130), according to laborers. The novel thus sets up music education as one of the successful philanthropic efforts of humane factory owners; it is an attainable ideal, which contrasts with the otherwise squalid conditions of working-class England. Lady Maud’s attitude is somewhat disturbing, however, for what it reveals about music’s place as allied with or opposed to materialism in Victorian Britain – a subject that scholars often overlook when examining the ideals voiced by sight-singing enthusiasts. While music as a means of instigating moral reform and social improvement became a popular idea from the 1840s through the early twentieth century, what is less obvious is that musical production also became a way of attaining material wealth and even exporting a notion of cultural identity. Moreover, through sight-singing classes and works bands, music itself can be seen as a product of industrialism. In terms of the above citation, for instance, economic gain for factory owners is the implied goal, even for the aristocratic Lady Maud with her “crusade” to make life beautiful for the people. Music and beauty therefore have social utility, which is a political stance 56



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opposing that of Benthamite Utilitarianism. Disraeli even went so far as to emphasize the importance of the aesthetic in civic governance as well as factory life. Disraeli’s Young England trilogy, of which Sybil is the second novel, does not stand alone as a fictional exploration of the connections between music and public order. Elizabeth Sara Sheppard’s novel Charles Auchester (1853) is a particularly fine example of how inspiring Disraeli’s brand of politics could be. Because of its popularity at the time, the novel also served to further publicize such ideas, especially among musicians. Clearly following in Disraeli’s footsteps, Charles Auchester bonds together the imaginative human being with a disciplined system of group management, depicting how effective aesthetic leadership results in moral and spiritual education for children and young adults, as well as building community and harmonizing class relationships. In comparison to Villette, published the same year, Charles Auchester depicts a more comfortable, even utopian, alliance between artistic idealism and surveillance. The passionate, creative world that Charlotte Brontë’s protagonist only accepts with difficulty is held up as an ideal for all classes in Sheppard’s novel. But while Brontë works within the tradition of the realist novel and highlights social problems, Sheppard’s idealist novel is not aware of flaws, either in the system criticized or the system proposed. The orientation toward a non-materialistic community aligns Charles Auchester with utopian narratives of the period, although Sheppard’s novel is not set in a far-away place or future time. Rather, the narrative is situated in a nineteenth-century world with a specific political vision – one that advocates imagination and beauty. Post-Enlightenment methods of achieving social order combine with Disraelian politics in this musical novel: leadership of the people by a passionate, heroic and imaginative figure is necessary for developing a true community made up of people willingly practicing and performing their ideals. Yet when materialism and discipline are allied to beauty, religion and music, other mid-century literature demonstrates that there are inherent paradoxes and tensions in this stance. While Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon (1872) and Hector Berlioz’s short story “Euphonia, ou la ville musicale” (1844) also set music against materialism, the world revealed in these fictional works is contradictory and ultimately not resolved. I include Berlioz not only because he revised “Euphonia” while living in London, but also because his short story demonstrates how widespread notions of music and ideal communities were in Western Europe. Sometimes spending years abroad, musicians, composers and conductors were international figures. Not only did other cultures influence them, but



Germanic Music Ideals in Utopian Communities 57

they had an opportunity to distribute their ideas widely, especially when they were also journalists, as Berlioz was. Butler and Berlioz write utopian fiction, but problematically so, for their narratives also probe the notion of Utopia itself. The result is a sense of music as crucial to national identity and the best of civilizations, and yet an acknowledgement of elements of competition, violence and aggression that occur in maintaining that national music, especially against other nations or national musics.

Charles Auchester The first and best of Sheppard’s five novels, Charles Auchester is today an obscure book, known only to an occasional literary scholar and, more frequently, to musicologists who work on Mendelssohn or nineteenthcentury Britain. The scant critical discussion that does exist on this novel focuses on the musical practices found in the narrative, entirely ignoring the underlying political dimension. My reading of the novel as bringing together music and a particular civic vision thus differs from the orientation of most readers of the day and since. In doing so, it addresses a significant oversight. For while the novel originally seems to have had a readership largely made up of musicians in Britain and the United States, it also drew approval from Disraeli, who helped Sheppard to publish her novel by forwarding the manuscript to his own publishers.2 Sheppard’s novel not only follows Dickens’s and Disraeli’s emphasis on music as important in anti-Utilitarian politics, but it also explicitly connects with Disraelian beliefs right from the opening pages. The novel’s epigraph is a quotation from Disraeli’s recently published Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography (1852): “Were it not for Music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.” While the capitalization of “Music” and “Beautiful” obliquely makes its point, in context the sentence specifically opposes music and materialism: The creative faculty of modern man seems by an irresistible law at work on the virgin soil of science, daily increasing by its inventions our command over nature, and multiplying the material happiness of man. But the happiness of man is not merely material. Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the beautiful is dead.3 The ideals espoused throughout Sheppard’s novel echo the citation: the beautiful and imaginative are more essential to community health than is “material happiness.”



58 The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910

The novel begins with several scenes that introduce the protagonist to three other characters, all of whom have their basis in real persons who enjoyed varying degrees of celebrity in the musical world. We see the young Charles Auchester (i.e. the composer Charles Horsley)4 introduced to music through singing in a choir conducted by Seraphael (i.e. Felix Mendelssohn), joining a singing class led by Lenhart Davy (i.e. music educator John Hullah), performing at a private concert along with another singing-class pupil, Clara Benette (i.e. the famous singer Jenny Lind), and receiving his first violin. His bourgeois family agrees that he will be happier as a musician than as a junior partner in the family mercantile business, and they send him to a German conservatory, appropriately called Cecilia for the patron saint of music. Before matriculating, Charles studies violin for several months with Aronach (i.e. Mendelssohn’s teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter)5 and meets a young and rather sniveling Starwood Burney (i.e. the respected English composer Sterndale Bennett).6 Meanwhile, at Cecilia, a change in directorship occurs between MilansAndré (i.e. the showy pianist Sigismund Thalberg)7 and Seraphael, and Seraphael falls in love with the singer Maria Cerinthea (i.e. the wellknown singer Maria Malibran), who is already engaged to Charles’s next violin teacher, Florimond Anastase (i.e. Berlioz).8 Maria’s talents extend to composition, but when she composes a full symphony in three months, her health is seriously compromised and she dies soon after conducting the first rehearsal. Heartbroken, Seraphael wanders Europe and we only encounter him again several years later after the adult Charles has returned to England where he assembles and instructs a working-class orchestra to complement Davy’s singing class. Clara, meanwhile, has become a famous singer after studying in Italy. When she also returns to England, Charles introduces her to Seraphael who convinces her not only to stop singing opera in favor of oratorio, but also to marry him. The two have a few happy years before he dies and the novel ends shortly thereafter.9 Upon publication, the fictionalization of real musicians was the novel’s biggest selling point. As The Critic reports: “The design of ‘Charles Auchester’ is, we believe, new to English fiction. It is a kind of art-history pourtraying the career of a musical genius, his struggles and triumphs.”10 The introduction to the novel by Jessie A. Middleton provides a key to the characters, which I have indicated in parentheses above. Although Middleton does not acknowledge her source, the key accords with Victorian journalists’ reviews, such as that appearing in Britannia: “The sketches of the masters and artists are life-like. In Seraphael all will recognize Mendelssohn, and in Miss Benette, Miss Lawrence, and Anastase,




Berlioz, Jenny Lind, and another well known to artist life, will be easily detected.”11 While many of the fictional personalities are only tenuously like the musicians upon whom they are modeled, certain events link the characters with their real-life counterparts. For instance, as occurs in the novel, Mendelssohn’s first trip to England (1829) included an introduction to the Horsley family (Charles was only seven), with whom he became a frequent visitor and correspondent. Besides conducting in London during this visit, Mendelssohn was inspired with the idea for The Hebrides Overture during a walking tour of Scotland, just as Seraphael conducts in Auchester’s hometown and leaves manuscript pages on Miss Lawrence’s piano in Scotland. Similarly, although the private production of the fairy operetta in celebration of Seraphael’s parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary occurs some time later in Charles Auchester, Mendelssohn did indeed have a Liederspiel privately performed for his parents’ silver wedding anniversary, Heimkehr aus der Fremde (1829).12 However, while the novel’s “fairy libretto”13 clearly includes elements of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Heimkehr aus der Fremde does not. Here, Sheppard blends various elements of Mendelssohn’s career; she combines the occasion of the anniversary with the characters Oberon, Titania and Ariel, with whom Mendelssohn is associated because of his famous overture and incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1827; 1843) and because he had seriously considered writing an operatic version of The Tempest. Finally, Seraphael and Mendelssohn are composers of oratorios that are performed in England, and, like Seraphael’s association with the triennial festival in a northern manufacturing town, Mendelssohn was hired to compose, conduct and perform for the Birmingham Festival in 1837.14 Then again, if we concentrate too much on matching the characters with their prototypes, we miss the political ideology that overlays the novel. Indeed, despite similarities between Seraphael and Mendelssohn, the even more obvious disparities frustrated reviewers like Henry Chorley, a friend of Mendelssohn’s: “No man who really knew Mendelssohn could for even a moment accredit the sentimental and sublime Seraphael as being, in any respect, a likeness of that real and sincere poet.”15 Instead of focusing on the events presented in the novel, Chorley concentrates on the personality, which is largely effected by the writing style. In these matters, Chorley’s account of the novel is accurate: it is indeed sentimental from start to finish, a style that eventually became so associated with Victorian memories of Mendelssohn that Shaw criticized the composer’s “kid glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio mongering.”16 Because this writing style influences the




portrayal of all the characters,17 the depiction of musicians in the novel should be taken as expressing early nineteenth-century ideologies rather than as entirely accurate portraits. As Sheppard yokes celebrated musical figures to a consideration of the ideal function of music in education, moral development and community formation, European musicians in Charles Auchester effectively become spokespersons for British civic movements where music had public purpose. This social orientation explains why despite the novel’s often unrealistic treatment of musical achievement (e.g., Clara’s daily nine hours of singing practice) and the highly fictionalized portrayals of actual musicians, standard Victorian beliefs about music, gender and class saturate the narrative. In terms of the last, for instance, Davy’s singing class is made up of children from the factory and theater. They are Charles’s social inferiors, as Davy explains, and yet the child sees the harmonizing and integrating effects of music education: “I should like to be friends with all the singers” (48). Furthering the idea of music performance as an assimilating and communal experience, most of the performances in the novel are given by ensembles: there are choral, orchestral, operatic, chamber music and oratorio performances. Only Milans-André entirely performs solos, a musical style that is denigrated, as is his government of Cecilia because his students spend their time loafing. Milans-André’s management is opposed to systems that work at establishing disciplined, productive collectives, just as his performance and compositional styles favor individual showmanship and virtuosity. The public reacts unfavorably; rather than the fascinated quiet guaranteed when Seraphael takes the stage, Milans-André’s audiences are distracted if not disapproving. Thus the ideals of music-making endorsed within the novel match those approved by Victorian music journalists: a quiet, disciplined group experience focused on Austro-German compositions. The orientation toward ensembles and Austro-German repertoire can be further explained through the fact that there were different reasons to attend concerts in nineteenth-century Britain. In an excellent analysis, Jennifer L. Hall-Witt divides the orientation of opera-going audiences in the second quarter of the century into those for whom opera was an “event” and those for whom it was a “work.”18 While it has yet to be uncovered whether music critics as a specific subgroup of the audience also applied these descriptions to other types of musical performances, this line of reasoning provides a good starting point for defining the general orientation of audience members. As Hall-Witt explains, musical “events” grew out of an eighteenth-century practice of writing music for a specific




performance. In other words, a composer did not necessarily anticipate that the entire piece would be performed again. Because composers expected solo performers to ornament the written melodic line, it was only at the performance that the piece truly reached completion, even earning for diva Maria Malibran the honorific of “composer” for particularly inventive embellishments.19 Eighteenth-century audiences were also considered performers in the event, contributing through encoring, conversing, audible approbation or criticism during the music-making, or simply viewing each other and thereby making the audience itself part of the attraction. In contrast, the idea of a “work,” which developed slowly in the early part of the nineteenth century, emphasized allegiance to the printed score, making the work permanent, repeatable and separating it from notions of social context.20 The concept of a “work” also encouraged the audience to orient itself to listening to the composition and to appreciating it through analysis of structure instead of by focusing on the star performer. As the introduction to the present study makes clear, the rise of the program note exponentially encouraged the practice of engaged listening as the century continued. Yet Hall-Witt notices that both types of audiences were present during the second quarter of the nineteenth century: the audience who went to the London opera to hear specific singers and/or to socialize was linked with the fashionable upper class (who primarily patronized Italian opera and French grand opera), and the other type of audience comprised middle-class “amateurs, musicians, and connoisseurs” who listened attentively to the composition, usually by an Austro-German composer.21 My comments should show that the history of listening in nineteenthcentury Britain is somewhat under-researched at present, so the picture presented here may be partial, especially regarding lower- and lowermiddle-class audiences. However, examining multiple discourses helps to give a fuller shape to the listening history thus far documented, especially if different modes of writing (such as criticism and fiction) are viewed as working together to reveal and even construct what it meant to gather at musical performances. Broadly speaking, in the early part of the century, novelists and music critics compositely narrated a division present at musical venues between newly-serious listeners and socializing elites, with the former including musical aficionados, professionals, and members of working-class music movements. Of course, this is not to say that all higher-class listeners found concerts to be primarily social opportunities. As Christina Bashford makes clear, the Musical Union, a series of upscale chamber music concerts running from 1845 to 1880 in




Harley Street, embraced an upper-crust group engaged in serious listening; they may have proven the exception, but they did exist.22 Sheppard’s narrative fits the trend of showing serious musicians as alert to the Austro-German “work,” yet complicates the presentation because instead of the rational focus that this “work”-based orientation was given in Victorian Britain, Charles Auchester’s listeners react rapturously. With this response, the novel builds in Victorian medical notions of reason or passion as intrinsic to individual biology. Sheppard’s depiction differs from Brontë’s notion that feeling can be self-regulated, instead leaning heavily toward the idea that a person is naturally either calm or emotional. However, while the younger novelist lacks Brontë’s probing awareness of the problems inherent in conceptualizing the human self as a site of regulated passions, Sheppard’s narrative does not similarly pathologize creativity, as when the excitable singer and composer, Maria Cerinthea, falls terminally ill while she is composing and conducting her symphony. In contrast, Clara’s successful singing career is explained because of her noticeable tranquility. Similar pronouncements are made on male characters, yet they seem marginally hardier than their female counterparts. The delicate pianist Starwood Burney suffers from nervous disease and, in his childhood, Charles is excitable whenever he encounters music, resulting in his family’s worried vigilance. Unusual for male characters in Victorian fiction, Charles is positively hysterical, as when he receives his violin: I sobbed; my head beat like a heart in my brain; I wept rivers. [ . . . ] It was mystery, it was passion, it was infinitude; it was to a soul like mine a romance so deep, that it has never needed other. My violin was mine, and I was it; (113) Despite Charles’s extreme emotion, he does not die as Maria does. Being a male performer is thus contrasted to being a female symphonic composer – a vocation that the novel condones just as the music profession did.23 Indeed, since Ian Graham-Jones documents Alice Mary Smith’s Symphony in C minor (1863) as the first symphony to be composed by a woman, except perhaps in France, Charles Auchester is quite advanced in its plot.24 Moreover, although the ostensible model for Maria Cerinthea was not a composer, singer Maria Malibran did die as a result of her wild personality (she was riding while pregnant). The novel fictionalizes the early death by giving it a configuration related to prohibitive musical activities for women: symphonic composition. There is another way of reading Maria Cerinthea’s death, however. Despite Middleton’s identification of Malibran as the prototype, the




character may amalgamate Malibran and Mendelssohn’s sister, composer Fanny Hensel. In his preface for a Mendelssohn biography, W.L. Gage suggests Hensel as the original because of the similarity between the novel’s and biography’s death scenes.25 “In the midst of a rehearsal of the choruses of the second part of ‘Faust,’ which [Hensel] had written, stimulated by her brother’s earnest wish that she should compose, overcome with a nervous attack, she sank dead upon her chair.”26 The similarity with Maria Cerinthea’s death in the novel is undeniable. So Charles Auchester may simply combine biographical details from the character’s two prototypes, rather than consciously comment on gender and composition. Regardless of who might have inspired the novelist, however, Charles Auchester still displays a double-edged notion of excitement: passionate sensibility is part of the creative personality and yet depicted as dangerously pathological, a notion that Brontë also explores in the same year in Villette. Thus the narrators in both novels associate music with excitement, even if in Villette it is also brought forth by other phenomena, such as sighting the “ghost.” Yet like the revision of Utilitarianism in the 1830s and 1840s to combine notions of self-help and self-interest with democracy, educational initiatives and moralizing forces,27 Sheppard’s passionate musicians operate within a strictly managed disciplinary system. Those who are unable to regulate themselves, like Maria who stays up late to compose, are criticized by other characters for making themselves ill. Sheppard’s novel represents mid-Victorian educational methods, based on the idea of discipline enforced by surveillance. Similar to associating music with promoting industry in factories and mines, in Charles Auchester music education includes not only instruction in music, but also in routine and scheduling. For instance, in conjunction with Davy’s singing classes, Clara exemplifies discipline to Charles when she calmly enforces his timely leave-taking from their lessons so that she may keep to her own practice schedule. The regimen is even more strictly imposed at Aronach’s establishment, where each boy is locked in his room to practice. But sound, rather than the gaze, is the method of surveillance; Aronach can hear whether the boys are practicing. The novel thus depicts music education methods that function similarly to Foucault’s account of observation and group management, especially in terms of architectural figures that functioned as disciplinary mechanisms. Famously, the principle of power – that it should be visible – found expression in circular building styles, as represented by Bentham’s Panopticon. In this model, which Foucault describes as a “diagram of a mechanism of power,”28 prison inmates were separated into individual cells that were pierced by light coming through two




windows: the exterior window functioned to let in light, backlighting the inmate so that, through the interior window, the activities of the individual were constantly visible to a supervisor in a central watchtower. The mass of inmates were separated and individuated with the idea that they could be surveyed at any time, without being able themselves to perceive when the supervisor turned his gaze upon them.29 Besides being a form of punishment, this system could be applied to education, where a task is assigned and individual industry and progress could be measured.30 As we see in Charles Auchester, it could also be used to monitor auditory achievements; individually locked in their rooms and unable to see Aronach, the students had no way of knowing when he would listen to them. The importance of the gaze in group management is also applicable to nineteenth-century changes in music education and performance. As Alison Winter documents, Britain lagged behind continental Europe in adopting the system of conducting orchestras with a baton instead of by the old “double-direction system” of following the conductor at the piano in the back, along with either the first violinist’s playing or the “leader” in front who clapped or tapped the beat.31 While foreign conductors invited to Britain began to use the baton as early as 1820 when Louis Spohr found that the London Philharmonic Society responded to his conducting with “more than usual attention,”32 it was not until the middle of the century that British orchestras widely adopted the new system. However, the press noted the advantages when Mendelssohn conducted in London in 1829: the baton conductor’s system was better in establishing “discipline.”33 Like Foucault’s notions of the “perfect disciplinary apparatus,” the new baton conductor provided a single “locus of convergence,” unlike the double-direction system in which two leaders might be involved and were separated by the width of the orchestra. In the new system, the conductor was at the front of the orchestra as a means of observing all, being seen by all, and as a guarantee that “all gazes would be turned”34 toward him because direction occurred through instrumentalists following his gestures, not through playing, clapping or tapping.35 By mid-century, the link between the baton conductor and the gaze was so essential to good ensemble playing that Charles Auchester depicts the effect of the disciplining baton. At the beginning of the novel, Seraphael makes a surprise appearance to conduct the Messiah at a music festival in Charles’s town: Swift as a beam of morning he sprang up the steps, and with one hand upon the balustrade bowed to the audience. In a moment silence seemed to mantle upon the hall.




He stood before the score, and as he closed upon the time-stick those pointed fingers, he raised his eyes to the chorus and then let them fall upon the band. Those piercing eyes recalled us. Every hand was on the bow, every mouthpiece lifted. [ . . . ] He raised his thin arm: the overture began. [ . . . ] The fire with which he led, the energy, the speed, could only have been communicated to an English orchestra by such accurate force. The perfection with which the conductor was endued must surely have passed electrically into every player; there fell not a note to the ground; such precision was well nigh oppressive – one felt some hand must drop. (32, 33) While the personality of the conductor, his divinity and thorough knowledge of the composition are what are communicated to the orchestra, the centrality not only of the “time-stick,” but also the conductor’s “piercing eyes,” establishes discipline. He takes charge of the orchestra, choir and impatient audience quickly and effectively. Far from being only a romanticized notion of Mendelssohn’s influence, the novel’s depiction of the conductor’s quick tempi, “fire” and exacting discipline were all commonly associated with Mendelssohn. His nephew, Sebastian Hensel, reported on Mendelssohn’s “ ‘despotic’ power” and authority in rehearsals with Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchester.36 Similarly, one of the conductor’s Leipzig colleagues, Wilhelm Adolf Lampadius, remembers Mendelssohn in terms paralleling the passage from Charles Auchester: When once his fine, firm hand grasped the bâton, the electric fire of Mendelssohn’s nature seemed to stream out through it, and was felt at once by singers, orchestra, and audience. We often thought that the flames which streamed from the heads of Castor and Pollux must play round his forehead, and break from the conductor’s staff which he held, to account for the wonderful manner with which he dissipated the slightest trace of phlegm in the singers or players under his direction.37 “Electric fire” streaming from the baton is quite similar to the fictional passage above, which speaks of “fire . . . passed electrically” through the conductor and his time-stick. Foucault’s emphasis of spatial placement and the gaze – of a central object that observes and that also inspires observation – are thus seen in musical innovations and depicted in fictional portrayals of baton conducting. Disciplined collective behavior is enforced, but its goal in Charles Auchester is the development of the artist, whom Charles describes as




having a special duty “imposed upon him or her, to let it be seen that art is the nearest thing in the universe to God, after nature” (387). This religious orientation of music is also demonstrated in the novel when the narrator repeatedly describes Seraphael, the “beam of morning,” as made of light and as having a sacred fire burning within that draws everyone’s respect. While Bentham’s use of light as a means of “illumination” was not meant in the spiritual sense of the word, it is nonetheless interesting for the connection made between gazing and the ability of the disciplinarian not only to lead but to enlighten. The people experience a musically perfect moment through concentrating on a central point – the leader – who illuminates the group. Rather different from Foucault’s notions, this depiction incorporates ideas about music as an improving moral and spiritual force, while also anticipating the dual responsibilities of the conductor, which Elliot W. Galkin credits as first appearing in treatises on conducting by Berlioz and Wagner: L’Art du chef d’orchestre (1855) and Über das Dirigeren (1860), respectively.38 According to Berlioz, the conductor should follow the composer’s intentions while also “transmitting” his own feeling to them, and so animating the players through “his inward fire.”39 Sheppard’s novel, published in 1853, anticipates by two years Berlioz’s notion of the conductor as more than a metronome or time-beater; according to Charles Auchester, he is a disciplinarian and a divine leader. This portrayal of leader and ideal student(s) mirrors a system of ideas espoused by Disraeli. Disraeli’s “only real social policy,” states John Vincent, was “the achievement of an era of good feeling” through “social unity based on a sense of community” rather than social reform brought about by state interference.40 This belief in the peaceful, mutually affectionate existence among the classes was combined with a confidence in individualism. As the young Disraeli cautioned in a tract following the Reform Act of 1832: Let us not forget also an influence too much underrated in this age of bustling mediocrity – the influence of individual character. Great spirits may yet arise, to guide the groaning helm through the world of troubled waters; spirits whose proud destiny it may still be, at the same time to maintain the glory of the Empire, and to secure the happiness of the People!41 In a government enacted through character and spirit, leaders should spark the imagination of the populace even beyond offering policies.42 Charles Auchester depicts a similar system of community and leadership, but places it in the musical world rather than the political.




Imagination, sentiment and spiritual ecstasy are kindled by Seraphael’s personality, and this experience of music is carefully differentiated in the novel from musical performance and personality that are primarily oriented around profit. Moreover, Sheppard’s main characters are moved by passionate response rather than reason – an orientation that might explain the overly sentimental writing style of Charles Auchester as well as its topic. The novel’s stress on aesthetics reaches across the classes to achieve an “era of good feeling,” too. Davy and Charles bring music to the working classes and these efforts combine with what literally becomes a happy family: Charles’s sister marries Davy, and Davy’s ward, Clara, marries Seraphael. A cohesive state is demonstrated and its foundation is a healthy interaction between the leader and his community. Charles Auchester expresses a mutually adoring interaction, frequent conversation about shared ideals, and a combinatory effort to produce music. Charles is the model citizen within this system as he obeys its disciplining power and works to achieve excellence within its doctrines. As stated, the music profession itself follows post-Enlightenment ideas of social ordering as oriented around discipline, individual practice, educational supervision in groups and individually, and performances of achievement. When an individual places himself willingly within this system, like Sheppard’s protagonist does, he absorbs the regulating gaze as part of his formation of self. Furthermore, Charles’s internalization of Seraphael’s values forms not only his own character, but also his vocational aspirations since he becomes a music professor and conductor instead of a performer. He chooses to disseminate musical and political ideals, just as the novel does by emphasizing anti-Utilitarian doctrine rather than realistic portraits of musical stars. Charles Auchester does not tell the story of a radical forming in opposition to the regulating forces in his society, but rather depicts an individual who finds himself in harmony with what are presented as natural, God-given values. Charles and his companions accept the principles of the 1840s rational recreation and self-help movement at face value and proceed to form peaceful citizens who teach their ideology to would-be renegades and members of lower social classes. These beliefs intersect with notions of moral management, for, as Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth aptly state, “[i]n an age of bewildering, mass social change, ideas of self-help and self-control firmly placed responsibility for success at the door of the individual.”43 Rational recreation was thus a doubleedged sword, for self-help was more than a philanthropic initiative; it also depended on the individual’s internalization of the social gaze.




The position expressed in Charles Auchester seems naïve because of the author’s inability to tease out tensions and problems in the medical ideals and social systems that she portrays. For instance, music for social improvement and divine expression is opposed to music for profit in the novel, but giving music classes to factory workers still implies monetary gain. Furthermore, art literally rules in Sheppard’s novel because it kindles passion, yet passion both shapes the ideal citizen and incites terminal disease. These are contradictions that the novel does not satisfactorily engage with, and although it proposes a utopian vision of integrated community, the narrative is simplistic in its idealism. Despite this immaturity, Charles Auchester is still important for demonstrating how music and politics were frequently envisioned in mid-nineteenth-century England as mutually dependent in forming a utopian vision of integrated community.

The musical city of the future and far away The notion of musical community as tied to civic government is found in nineteenth-century European modes of perceiving community, too. For instance, Ingrid Sykes has documented how in France the nation was perceived metaphorically to be a huge organ, with cartoons and prose equating the political orator with the bellows in an elaborately diagrammed organ pipe.44 The image of the organ as a city is also found in late-Victorian fiction, as in Butler’s Erewhon when the narrator dreams of a New Zealand woolshed: I dreamed that there was an organ placed in my master’s wool-shed; the wool-shed faded away, and the organ seemed to grow and grow amid a blaze of brilliant light, till it became like a golden city upon the side of a mountain, with rows upon rows of pipes set in cliffs and precipices, one above the other, and in the mysterious caverns, like that of Fingal, within whose depths I could see the burnished pillars gleaming. In the front there was a flight of lofty terraces, at the top of which I could see a man with his head buried forward towards a keyboard, and his body swaying from side to side amid the storm of huge arpeggioed harmonies that came crashing overhead and round. Then there was one who touched me on the shoulder, and said, “Do you not see? it is Handel?”45 In this dream, the composer is figured as playing the organ, which, by extension, also suggests that he “plays” the musical city. Similarly, Berlioz’s




“Euphonia” imagines music and community structure as entwined, and thus connects with themes explored by Dickens, Disraeli, Brontë and Sheppard. However, rather than setting the stories in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe, Butler’s and Berlioz’s narratives take place in remote fantasy lands which nonetheless comment on present society. In these fictional works, Butler and Berlioz represent cities as musical instruments to be played by composer figures, rather than as musical ensembles consisting of individuals who collaborate with the conductor and composer. This rendering aligns representations of civic leadership with the hierarchy established by the nineteenth-century music profession, where allegiance to the printed score is generally made more important than virtuosic embellishment. Unlike Charles Auchester where such an orientation is depicted with sentimental idealism, Butler’s and Berlioz’s fictional works portray society and the musical world complexly: utopian visions are combined with satire (Butler) and the macabre (Berlioz), thereby resulting in a set of ideals and critiques. This debate, whether focused on a city or a nation, finally comments on wider notions of governance, for utopian communities were imagined as opposed to political systems of the day.46 In his popular utopian novel, which satirically inverts current British mores and institutions, Butler opposes music and religion to materialism: they are central, if seemingly opposing, values of a nation. In the book, narrator and protagonist George Higgs crosses New Zealand’s Southern Alps and stumbles upon Erewhon (“Nowhere” misspelled backwards), a nation whose customs and beliefs invoke, distort and satirize Victorian life.47 The satirical aspect is so strong that the novel has sparked criticism ranging from whether the satire requires us to dismiss the utopian parts, to simple acknowledgement that the satirical features make it “the most difficult to classify”48 of utopian novels, as A.L. Morton observes. The utopian elements are apparent in various ways, as Sue Zemka explains, from the name of the novel to Higgs’s quest for unpopulated pastureland, gold or savage souls to convert. “Erewhon” literally means “nowhere,” just as “utopia” was coined by Thomas More from a combination of eutopos (good place) and outopos (nowhere).49 However, Higgs’s dreams of unpopulated land turn out to be unfounded, and the absurd society that he finds is far from utopian as it inverts Victorian social, cultural and religious institutions to satiric extremes. The absurdities may be partially explained because Higgs publishes the book to promote his imperialist agenda; not only does he spoof Victorian society, but the ludicrous elements are perhaps meant to justify colonialist annexation. In his discussion of early to mid nineteenthcentury missionary ethnography of the South Pacific (including New




Zealand), Christopher Herbert reveals a group of writers who are similar to Higgs in many ways, including the fact that their proselytizing zeal was motivated for personal glory and that they had a “need to portray the countries selected for evangelism as sites of almost unqualified moral depravity.”50 What is unique to Erewhon, however, is that the narrator not only combines elements of gentleman traveler and missionary, but also those of the musical aficionado, and so makes ethnomusicological observations. Musical elements play an important role in depicting not only competing forces within a single culture (materialism versus religion and artistic production), but also how one nation envisions its superiority. In Erewhonian society, music is a part of religion, which is directly opposed to capitalism. This orientation is prefigured in the initial dream of Handel at the organ, which combines images of the woolshed and cathedral because Higgs had previously described his master’s woolshed as “built somewhat on the same plan as a cathedral” (15). The woolshedcum-cathedral is particularly appropriate because Higgs is motivated to cross the Alps to find pasture land or gold (projects for fiscal gain), or to convert the people. Because he then discovers a community divided between the values of pastoral materialism and religion, Erewhon mimics values embedded in Higgs’s personality. Closure occurs when Higgs forms the “Erewhon Evangelization Company, Limited” in the final pages – a venture that brings together missionary activities and commercial gain by proposing a project little short of enslavement. He suggests mounting an armed expedition to lure Erewhonians into emigration to Queensland where they will work the sugar fields and simultaneously be converted to Christianity, thereby comforting shareholders because they would be simultaneously “saving souls and filling their own pockets” (189). Conversion, rather than being based solely on religious zeal, excuses exploitation and capital gain – aspects underlying Higgs’s idea of utopia from the first, despite the fact that nineteenth-century British utopian visions often critiqued capitalistic exploitation of workers. Materialism and the plight of laborers are as strong a reason as the satire for questioning just how utopian Erewhon finally is. Erewhonian society is also oriented around commerce, but its economic structure eschews mechanical production because of the hypothesis that machines might become sentient and overpower humanity. Two banking systems are found in Erewhon: one distributes currency with commercial value while the other currency displays that you have values, or religion. The second is ostensibly the primary system, however it works directly against the materialism of the first because these second banks trade in




currency with “no direct commercial value in the outside world” (90). The second banks (cathedrals) appeal to the imagination through decor (e.g., stained glass “descriptive of the principal commercial incidents of the bank for many ages”) and sound: “all mercantile transactions were accompanied with music, so they were called Musical Banks, though the music was hideous to a European ear” (92, 90). The music is provided by boys’ choirs whose music is not based on the diatonic scale: The singers seemed to have derived their inspirations from the songs of birds and the wailing of the wind, which last they tried to imitate in melancholy cadences that at times degenerated into a howl. To my thinking the noise was hideous, but it produced a great effect upon my companions, who professed themselves much moved. (92) This commercial system, described as appealing “strongly to the imagination” (90), is directly opposed to the laissez-faire economic structure of the other Bank, where those who are swindled are punished for gullibility. Erewhon is thus similar to the other novels that I have investigated, where music and the aesthetic are opposed to materialistic modes of governance. Indeed, the role of music is crucial; it is more important than commercialism when it comes to projecting national identity to outsiders. Before beginning their journey, Higgs’s aborigine guide, Chowbok, describes Erewhon by striking a fiendish pose on a bale of wool, indicating the lost ten tribes of Israel with his ten fingers, and making the sound of the music: “there came from his lips a low moaning like the wind, rising and falling by infinitely small gradations till it became almost a shriek, from which it descended and died away” (16). By suggesting the degeneracy of this music and that of the Musical Banks, the narrator practices a form of cultural domination that only continues Higgs’s overtly colonial stance, where he sees the discovery of a new land as a chance to convert or fiscally exploit the people. Even though the novel has been examined from a postcolonial stance, ethnomusicological readings have so far been lacking – an oversight since music in Erewhon is a literal protection of geographic borders. As Erewhon is perhaps the last utopian novel to locate Utopia in an undiscovered place rather than the future, its identification of music with land is especially important. At the hidden mountain pass leading into the country stand gigantic statues, “six or seven times larger than life, of great antiquity” (33). They initially visually terrify the narrator with their deformed expressions, but they are even more frightening aurally,





The wildness of the wind increased, the moans grew shriller, coming from several statues, and swelling into a chorus. [ . . . ] The inhuman beings into whose hearts the Evil One had put it to conceive these statues, had made their heads into a sort of organ-pipe, so that their mouths should catch the wind and sound with its blowing. It was horrible. However brave a man might be, he could never stand such a concert, from such lips, and in such a place. (33) Cultural production literally blocks invasion by other cultures. Because it is musical culture that defends Erewhon, the scene complicates Edward Said’s focus on the European novel as “the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study” because “[t]he power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism.”51 Famously, Said argues that narrative asserts cultural authority on the part of the colonizers, or reasserts their own identity on the part of the colonized. He does take pains to say, “I do not mean that only the novel was important” to “the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences,”52 but Said clearly places the realistic novel at the top of his artistic hierarchy. In pre-colonized Erewhon, however, native cultural production is music and it literally serves to warn others away, as it successfully does with Chowbok’s people. The Erewhonians expect the statues to have this protective function, as they express when they encounter Higgs: Then one of them pointed to the mountain, in the direction of the statues, and made a grimace in imitation of one of them. I laughed and shuddered expressively, whereon they all burst out laughing too, and chattered hard to one another. [ . . . ] I think they thought it rather a good joke that I had come past the statues. (37) The incident is not only one of the first communications between the two cultures, but Higgs also saves his life by demonstrating that he is unafraid of their cultural production. Clearly, in considering Higgs’s imperialist experiences, we must reflect on the place of music as well as narrative. Braving the hideous music is presented as an act of humorous machismo, but it is also literally an invasion; it denies the effectiveness of another nation’s boundaries. Thus Higgs positions himself as superior to



for when the wind blows through their hollowed heads, it makes them sound like the noise made by Chowbok:

Erewhonian people not only by plotting to enslave them, but also by disregarding and denigrating their cultural production. Significantly, their mode of scare-tactics is non-narrative, in contrast to Higgs’s planned domination through storytelling. As Said argues, “stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world.”53 Writing a novel to advertise the Erewhon Evangelization Company means that Erewhon, literally bounded by music, is to be exploited through several steps, the first of which is publishing a tale of an absurd culture in need of salvation and, therefore, of capital investment. Combined with this keen awareness of music is a stance familiar in an age of Victorian missionary activity. Not only is music included in Higgs’s observation of another culture’s religion, but in the process his own identity is thrown into question. Herbert describes how early British missionaries to the South Pacific experienced “a state of radical instability of value – or even the instability of selfhood itself” – an unsurprising result of the fact that they championed British religion, capitalism and culture, while submerged in a culture radically different from home.54 In Erewhon, not only is the country bounded by music, but so is Higgs’s own sense of identity; he is confused and alarmed by this culture, and it begins with a series of musical moments as Chowbok sings the statues’ music and as Higgs hears the strains in his dreams and experiences. Given his own evangelical orientation and the loud proclamations made by Victorian missionaries to suppress moral and Satanic evil,55 it is hardly surprising that Higgs associates the eerie sound of the musical statues with the devil (“Evil One”). However, the demonic label demonstrates cultural elitism since the Erewhonians assign divine function to this music: the boys’ choirs make a similar sound in the Musical Banks. Likewise, the “chanting” (33) statues, being given a human configuration (a “chorus” coming from “lips” of pipes made to look human [33] ), specifically reference a human choir, rather than being what they actually are: natural sounds, like a gigantic windpipe. These statues, Higgs later discovers, are remnants of a primitive age during which sacrifices were offered to the statues to propitiate the gods of illness and ugliness. The music’s religious purpose becomes even more explicit when the narrator identifies the sound of the enormous statues as similar to the opening bars of Handel’s Prelude to the Suite in B-flat, which is printed in score notation at the end of the chapter. This comparison not only links the statues with Higgs’s own dream of Handel at the organ-city, but it also demonstrates a level of respect because Butler was known to be obsessed with Handel: he referenced the composer throughout his fiction, poetry and non-fiction prose; composed music in Handelian style; and was




commissioned by The Drawing Room Gazette to write three reviews of performances of Handel’s music in late 1871 and early 1872. Giving this music to the statues was a particularly significant gesture since, as Michael Allis has shown, Butler suggested in one of the Gazette reviews that the same measures be used to introduce Israel in Egypt because they are “full and titanic,” with “colossal character.”56 Just a few months later in Erewhon, Butler made the colossal statues sing what he considered “colossal” chords. On one level, then, the huge statues ape Handel’s importance to Victorian Britain, when gigantic choirs gathered to sing his oratorios, even if their large proportions were because of their numbers rather than giantism. Additionally, the powerful music given to the enormous statues demonstrates how late nineteenth-century large-scale music was frequently perceived. In a fascinating article on “Liszt’s Musical Monuments” (2002), Alexander Rehding explores the conflation of the “superhuman”57 reputation of Franz Liszt with his “superhuman”58 musical style, in part through Liszt’s influential role at the festival that unveiled the Bonn Beethoven Monument in 1845. At this festival, Liszt first used in a large-scale work the technique of apotheosis, which Rehding describes as the moment when the principal theme, which characterizes the hero, returns at the end of the piece and is presented in its constituent elements blown up beyond all proportions and, because it is typically slowed down tremendously, is split up into smaller segments. In other words, if the theme characterizes the hero, the technique used for the apotheosis presents it no longer as a contiguous melody but as the gigantic, larger-than-life – in short, superhuman – object of admiration and glorification.59 This bombastic moment is employed to what Rehding calls a “totalitarian” effect: “it is a climax that does not permit objections.”60 Composers like Franz Liszt, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky repeatedly created these effects in sound.61 Simultaneously, there were efforts to represent the greatness of the composer and his music by erecting monuments, which initiated debate throughout Europe as to whether transcendent music should, or could, be rerepresented in statuary.62 Butler also addresses the problems of representation later in his novel when he spoofs the Erewhonian practice of memorializing the dead with statues, which, because of the glut of monuments, are not actually made. Instead, a plaque indicates that the statue had been commissioned. Nonrepresentation is not only the answer to over-crowding, though. It also




seems similar to Schumann’s worry about the Bonn Beethoven Monument. As Rehding shows, Schumann concludes in an editorial in his journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (1836), that it is best not to represent the legacy of Beethoven, because it will be that representation that is remembered rather than the sublime music, and that legacy will then be subject to misinterpretation: “Schon ein Denkmal ist eine vorwärts gedrehte Ruine, wie eine Ruine ein rückwärts gedrehtes Denkmal ist.” [A monument is a ruin turned forward, just as a ruin is a monument turned backward.]63 The “ruin” occurs because the monument decays over time, but the implication is also that the legacy is ruined through the monumentalizing process. Butler’s colossal and literally musical statues can be seen as referencing the nineteenth-century practice of putting up monuments to composers. Erewhon comments on the vogue by declaring the great statues visually and aurally hideous and distorting. Moreover, these musical statues, vestiges of a bygone age meant to appease the suprahuman, can be interpreted as a “monument turned backward,” because they are incomprehensible to Higgs, while simultaneously referencing Handel. There is something uncanny, unheimlich, about the statues that does remind Higgs of Western – specifically English – culture, even though he only consciously recognizes the connection between the statues’ music and Handel’s colossal chords after returning to London. However, he had already made the connection unconsciously because he dreams of Handel playing the organ-pipe city while hearing “a faint and extremely distant sound of music, like that of an Aeolian harp, borne upon the wind which was blowing fresh and chill from the opposite mountains” (27). Higgs then identifies this music as the same as that made previously by Chowbok on the bale of wool. Therefore, part of the narrator’s reaction to the statues may be accounted for by their familiarity. In fact, the identification of the music is even more striking given the “caverns, like that of Fingal” in the dream, which we might think of today as suggesting Mendelssohn and his Hebrides overture, not Handel. However, there were hundreds of Ossian-inspired musical works at the time, so a direct association with Mendelssohn is not necessarily implied.64 Instead of identifying the caves with a particular composed piece of music, it is the caverns’ auditory and architectural aspects that the dream references – aspects that captured the Romantic imagination, as Jennifer Davis Michael has demonstrated by looking at Turner’s painting and Wordsworth’s and Keats’s verse. Not only did the period frequently compare Fingal’s Caves to cathedrals (as Higgs does),65 but for Wordsworth the construction of the caves are tied to “the sovereign Architect” and “agency divine.”66




Higgs combines the Aeolian harp with this idea of a divine force that fashions an acoustic cave. While the Romantic motifs of wind harp and Fingal’s Caves were fundamentally different,67 Higgs’s unconscious conflates two Romantic images connected with divinity, creativity and sound: the caverns that have spatial solidity and structure (like a built city) and the breeze, which travels through space. Unsurprisingly, his dreams register these tropes imperialistically: the expanding organ, originating in the master’s woolshed, grows into a city with specifically British references (Scottish caves, Handel). The statues’ music is not simply “Other,” but rather is understood in relation to Western music and British culture. This association allows Higgs to read native music as inferior because he has a point of comparison with a lauded composer, who evokes English religion and music.68 Higgs must “object” to the moment of apotheosis and resist the suprahuman musical statues. But his reaction also registers his destabilized sense of self and confusion about the culture he encounters: this is overwhelming Western music, and yet it is “Other.” Thus Erewhon explores music as being relevant to constructions of nation and personal identity, but adds an imperialist twist quite different from what occurs in Villette and Charles Auchester. Although music is contrasted to materialism in Erewhon, it is an expression of national identity that becomes a way of demonstrating cultural superiority; as a part of Higgs’s identity as an Englishman, Handel’s music is entwined with his agenda of capitalist gain through imperialism. Countries compete through cultural production, so there is a notion of materialist gain built into music in this novel, despite the two separate banking systems in Erewhon. Also unlike the other novels examined thus far, Erewhon does not make discipline and surveillance part of the Erewhonian culture, except as advocated by a group of malcontents who propose prison reformation. Perhaps the differences result from the fact that Erewhon is a late nineteenth-century novel rather than a mid-century narrative, for Berlioz’s short story from the 1840s certainly shares with the other fiction an orientation toward regimen and discipline. “Euphonia, or the Musical City: a tale of the future” was written by Berlioz in 1844 for the Gazette Musicale – a specialist journal consisting of articles penned by literary and musical artists for a musically literate readership.69 The story was then made into the twenty-fifth evening of the collection of criticism, Les soirées de l’orchestre, a grouping of previously-written articles that Berlioz chose and revised while resident in London in spring 1852. He published them in Paris in December 1852 and they reached best-seller status by January 1853.70 The book was first translated as Evenings with the Orchestra in 1929. While it is unknown




if Sheppard read “Euphonia” before beginning to write Charles Auchester, she might have done since she was fluent in French by the age of eleven,71 the story first appeared when she was fourteen, and Berlioz was a familiar figure in London from 1847. If she did not read “Euphonia,” the fact that the two pieces were written so closely to each other demonstrates how common, and international, the connections were between civic unity and musical community. Les soirées is conceived as the gatherings of an opera orchestra to discuss the reading they pursue during performances of bad operas. Berlioz represents himself as listening to these conversations and then publishing the stories along with the musicians’ debates about them. Of these, “Euphonia” is told on the last evening by Corsino, the fictional concertmaster and composer. Set in 2344, “Euphonia” is the name of a German “Musical City,” as the title indicates, a city made up of twelve thousand inhabitants who are instrumentalists, singers, instrument manufacturers and music publishers. Euphonia is envisioned as utopian – specifically “a true conservatory.”72 This musical utopia becomes a vehicle for criticizing Italian singers, compositions and bel canto, as this type of singing seems laughable to the twenty-fourth-century Euphonians. Likewise, it proposes what the best music will be: unsurprisingly for Berlioz, it will descend from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s musical style and be faithful to printed score and composer. Music is not only the sole industry and livelihood of this community, but it is also an ideal product because its production comprises work and play. Unlike the other fiction I have discussed, Berlioz’s story does not suggest that music should become important to national governance. Rather, it concentrates on applying a paradigm of governance to the musical city that is rather like the discipline expected of musicians in Charles Auchester. Methods of regimen and surveillance are found in daily life, citizenship requirements, music education and music performance, and these practices ultimately uphold musical ideals. As the town’s charter explains, it is “governed in military fashion [ . . . ]. Hence the perfect order which obtains in study and the marvelous results that ensue for art” (283). The directions for daily activities are given by “a huge organ situated at the top of a tower rising above all the buildings of the town” (285), similar to the metaphoric idea in French cartoons of the political orator as an organ pipe, combined with a structure that recalls the central watchtower of Bentham’s Panopticon. This “aural telegraphy” is combined with “visual telegraph” in Berlioz’s short story. As sound marks the time for commencing “workinghours, meals, and meetings” (thereby coordinating the populace into a





An ingenious mechanism, which might have been invented five or six centuries earlier if someone had taken the trouble to design it, and which is actuated by the conductor without being visible to the public, indicates to the eye of each performer, and quite close to him, the beats of each measure. It also denotes precisely the several degrees of piano or forte. In this way the performers are immediately and instantaneously in touch with the conductor’s intention, and can respond to it as promptly as do the hammers of a piano under the hand pressing the keys. The master can then say with perfect truth that he is playing the orchestra. (287; original emphasis) Far from being a fantastic notion, Berlioz did subsequently take “the trouble to design it” in 1855, although with a few changes. As Alison Winter explains in Mesmerized, Berlioz’s “electric baton” was an invention allowing him to conduct groups that were too large to establish eye contact with all the players. He tapped the beat into telegraph wires connected to metronomes, which sub-conductors used to conduct their own section of the orchestra.73 According to the passage from “Euphonia,” Berlioz seems to have perceived this as coordinating a large group into a single instrument (“a piano”) to be played upon by the conductor, “immediately and instantaneously,” just as daily life in the Musical City is organized to the sound of an organ. Not only is the notion of the orchestra as an “immense keyboard played by the conductor” familiar from Berlioz’s influential Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (1843),74 but his ideas anticipate the passage in Erewhon where Handel “plays” the city. Also like Butler’s novel, Berlioz’s piece does not present an unproblematic fantasyland. Despite the idealism of a “City of Harmony” (275) where labor and machinery produce coordinated music and citizens instead of “the clink of money” (260), the ghastly ending of the story demonstrates that bestial emotions still exist. This musical community may be opposed to materialism, but the desire to uphold Euphonia’s ideals and to exact revenge for betrayed love leads to criminal behavior that goes virtually unpunished. “Euphonia” is the tale of a love triangle: the composer Xilef is left by his fiancée, the singer Mina, who subsequently captures the heart of



rhythmically-unified mass in their daily life), the gaze organizes sound in orchestral conducting in Euphonia (285). For instance, the composer “climbs the podium to conduct” hundreds of performers and instigates a futuristic method of leading the group by a flashing metronome:

Shetland, another composer and Xilef’s best friend. Both composers inhabit Euphonia, but Mina must prove her worthiness to enter the community since she is originally celebrated for her gorgeous voice and ornamentations, not for fidelity to the composer’s score or, literally, to the composer (Xilef, Shetland).75 Shetland is unaware that Mina is Xilef’s lost love since she has changed her name; neither is he aware of her many love affairs. Xilef, however, in stalking Mina, has discovered the extent of her unfaithfulness and decides to punish her and her lovers. The deaths of these characters when they are crushed by the collapsing walls of an iron summerhouse are depicted as necessary punishment for the worm in the fruit of an idyllic community. In Euphonia, allegiance to the musical score is stressed, and therefore punishment is exacted against the gifted diva whose “florid singing” (278) is accompanied by promiscuity. Indeed, Mina’s ego-driven deceptions are part of a wider misogyny in the narrative, where women are lesser than men in character and musical ability. However, like the virtuosic, Thalbergschool of playing which is criticized in Charles Auchester, for Euphonia to continue as a utopian musical community it must rid itself of an egotistical musician. This is part of the discipline exacted by the town as well as by the jilted lover. Despite its gruesomeness, the murder parallels the ideals of Euphonia, where “no privileges are granted any artists to the detriment of art” and where “truth of expression” is so important that those who lack that ability are banished or demoted to “inferior employment, such as the preparation of catgut for strings or the tanning of skins for kettle-drums” (288, 284). Just as music protected national borders in Erewhon, in Euphonia certain musical rules establish city boundaries: inclusion or exclusion in this community is determined by the performance of music, and, while there are no singing statues, in “Euphonia” boundaries are still symbolized by a monument. The Gluck Festival (where Gluck’s Alcestis and Shetland’s fictional Song of Praise are performed, and where Mina’s decorative singing is banned) culminates in the crowning of Gluck’s statue – an honor that Shetland pityingly offers to Mina. She accepts by singing Alcestis’s aria without ornamentation and is therefore welcomed into the community as she crowns “the Olympian head of Gluck” (281). Mina has first performed an act of fealty to Gluck’s musical legacy through her singing style, and then pays homage to the composer’s emblem (monument) and the musical community’s laws. When she proves faithless, however, she is killed. Demonstrating enthusiasm for beauty and also depraved misery, Xilef’s homicidal act is part of Berlioz’s configuration of the ideal musician and




the enforcement required of a community manufacturing “the great art” (269). The excessive response is also similar to Berlioz’s own personality: the composer suffered from emotional extremes of enthusiasm and depression, caused partly by his perception of the world’s failure to meet his ideals. These violent mood swings are reflected in his compositions and prose.76 Xilef’s name is also a case in point, which Katherine Kolb has recognized as reversing the Latin word for happy: felix.77 The ideal is set up but, resting on a foundation of heinous crime, it is also flawed, backward and open to critique. Certainly the orchestral players who hear the story struggle with the macabre tale and their understanding of Corsino’s creative mind: BACON:

You know, Corsino frightens me. To write such dreadful things a man must be rabid. WINTER: He is an Italian! DERVINCK: He is a Corsican! TURUTH: He is a gangster! MYSELF: He is a musician! (296)78 DIMSKY:

Significantly, it is the composer Berlioz (Myself), who understands that the tale expresses something about music and the creative mind. As Kolb documents, Berlioz believed that music (and prose) should disturb as well as entertain.79 So “Euphonia” is about more than Utopia; given the composer’s leadership role in Euphonia, the story expresses something about music itself and the nineteenth-century musical world. Remembering Habermas’s notion of how the public sphere is formed by reading and discussion, Les soirées is mimetic in organization. Because the prologue introduces the stories as coming from club members who discuss readings, we have “Euphonia” (a tale of a musical community) and, published after it, discussion by a musical community. The group seeks to understand the tale’s dark undercurrents and the subject, which is that of their own musical sphere. Just as the representation of political crowds in novels adds through their public circulation to real debates about social order, Berlioz’s fictional representation of musical groups discussing seemingly perfect musical communities cements notions of what constitutes an ideal, but also unsettles it, promoting conversation. I propose that these narratives participate in the actual construction of the nineteenth-century world; they are not merely stories using musical metaphors for community, especially because “Euphonia,” originally published as music criticism, is a consciously critical activity on the part of the author. In other words, “Euphonia” forms part of the rational-critical




realm as much as the aesthetic; it depicts a debate but it is also part of a larger debate concerning musical ideals and community. “Euphonia” (eupho¯nos, pleasant sound), then, is far from “Euphoria” (euphorus, borne well) or, ultimately, “utopia” (eutopos, good place), just as it differs greatly from Sheppard’s purely sentimental depiction of community oriented around genius. Despite its absurdities, Berlioz’s narrative demonstrates a more realistic notion of the tensions inherent in communities where ideals are strictly enforced. “Euphonia” and Erewhon depict the yearning for perfect states, but also the notion of their being in some respect flawed and sometimes even maintained by violent action – an obvious connection given the revolutionary rumblings in nineteenthcentury Europe. Really, these idyllic communities are outopos (nowhere), whether they are situated in a spatially distant place like New Zealand, at a temporal distance in the future, or even in a fictionalized Victorian musical community led by Mendelssohn, Hullah and Horsley. And yet, music and cultural production are firmly rooted in geography in “Euphonia” as well as Erewhon. There are no gigantic statues marking national borders in Berlioz’s story, but landscape is compared to schools of singing. In the second paragraph of the story, Xilef describes a lake that had subdued the volcanic “fires of Etna”: What a strange and terrible struggle that must have been! What a spectacle! The earth quaking in horrible convulsions, the huge mountain collapsing on itself, [ . . . ] the ironic hissing of the waters that rush in from a thousand subterranean springs, pursue their enemy, grip it, close in on it, smother and kill it, then suddenly become calm again, ready to smile at the slightest breath of wind. (259) The struggle, “spectacle,” and the smothering and killing foreshadow the iron pavilion collapsing in, with the sudden tranquility being like Xilef’s calm following the carnage. Just as the volcano is associated with Mina, the “quaking” earth also references the virtuosic shakings of her singing style. The calm waters therefore can be read as the Germanic/ Euphonian (pleasant sounding) school, giving a geographic configuration to the struggle between musical ideals. In Erewhon, non-Western and Western music were dialectics; in “Euphonia,” the opposition occurs in terms of Italianate and Germanic style. But in both cases, dominance of one musical style over another is linked to the conquering of land. As the next chapter explains, this conception of musical style as inherent to national geography was deep-seated in nineteenth-century music aesthetics and fictional representations.





In 1864, George Meredith published his novel Emilia in England, later changing the title to Sandra Belloni in 1886. Meanwhile, the sequel Vittoria appeared, first in the Fortnightly Review (January–December 1866) and then as a novel in January 1867.1 From the beginning, the author envisioned the two novels as a single project. Similar political, scientific and aesthetic ideals are held in common between them, even though they are strikingly different stylistically, as scholars frequently comment.2 Gillian Beer, for instance, writes that Vittoria’s movement toward epic breaks with the analytic style of Meredith’s earlier novels.3 Rather than emphasize Meredith’s evolving experiments in form, however, the present and next chapter explore the ideological similarities and developments between Sandra Belloni and Vittoria, which are ambitious in their portrayal of the interlocking psyches of individuals, nations and even revolution itself.4 As J.S. Stone suggests, publishing Vittoria in a journal under the editorship of G.H. Lewes reveals something about the novel’s stance since Lewes’s policy was to support struggles for independence, unity and freedom of expression.5 This orientation is obvious in terms of Vittoria, a novel about Young Italy, but in Sandra Belloni political ideals are also connected to scientific theories about natural law and the self-determinism of individuals and nations.6 Beyond his radical politics, Lewes was popularly known for his ideas about physiological psychology as placed within social evolution, including how these ideas work in daily life.7 Meredith was similarly concerned, especially with the shameful negligence of the rich and the need for individual and national evolution, which would aid species’ evolution.8 In Sandra Belloni, these ideas are expressed as the difference between sentimentality and passion, the latter of which is defined by 83



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Passion, he says, is noble strength on fire, and points to Emilia as a representation of passion. She asks for what she thinks she may have; she claims what she imagines to be her own. She has no shame, and thus, believing in, she never violates, nature, and offends no law, wild as she may seem. [ . . . ] Constantly just to herself, mind! This is the quality of true passion.9 As the narrator states earlier in the novel, it is important to “explain an act on which the story hinges, while it is advancing” because the act is “an impulse of character” (92). The above passage shows that Emilia is a person whose impulses illustrate passion, while the sentimentalists’ actions reveal madness and delirium (389).10 Meredith’s narrative technique thus relies on ideas established by physiological associationists of the time such as Herbert Spencer and G.H. Lewes, who believed that unconscious motivations were physically manifested.11 Mental activities are shown through the individual’s reflexive actions, so behavior directly reveals the character’s psychology. In particular, Sandra Belloni and Vittoria express ways of imagining community that are reliant on individuals being able to respond reflexively to passionate music. Given Benedict Anderson’s influential theory of parallel readerships as forming the concept of “nation” (people read the same newspaper on the same day and therefore imagine themselves as linked together into a group), Meredith’s two novels suggest that we need to complicate our understandings of nation-formation to include elements besides reading. Meredith expresses how, in responding to musical performance, illiterate communities are able to form a group with greater cohesion and evolutionary potential than the reading public. To some extent this fictional portrayal works with actual trends in nineteenthcentury Britain. As I investigated in the introduction, the middle classes saw music as an especially potent communicative force for largely illiterate populations. Meredith’s narratives agree with this view: in Sandra Belloni, the middle and upper classes may be appalled that the gifted singer Emilia “was evidently uneducated” (10), but it is the uneducated people who ultimately show a greater ability to interpret reality, naturally respond to music, and coordinate as a group. As I show in the next chapter, Vittoria similarly demonstrates how, in a largely illiterate country, revolutionaries communicate messages through the medium of opera. Then again, rather than simply contradicting theories of readership as



“the Philosopher,” a figure who helps the reader to interpret the characters’ actions:

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forming groups, the novels question how well readers interpret, and subsequently (strangely) publish these ideas through the written word. Sandra Belloni, the topic of this chapter, builds on Victorian evolutionary biology and also on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about the influence of climate on racial development, language, and musical semiotics. In the novel, we see that music is so powerful in part because musical “language” is figured as geo-politically rooted. As I will return to, the eponymous harpist in Meredith’s novel performs in natural surroundings, but more than just being a picturesque backdrop, the land itself permeates her character and music, meshing together musical style, geography, climate, the performer’s body, and nationality into an interlocking web of meaning. My proof focuses on the significant role of music in nineteenth-century discussions of northern and southern European cultural difference, a point seemingly ignored in current scholarship on these regional distinctions. In thinking about Europe, critics generally view the “south” as Italy and the “north” as those countries north and west of the Alps,12 and music researchers also see the point of division in relation to musical composition and performance style, as I pointed out in the previous chapter. These national music identities, based on regional and stylistic differences, recall the conclusion of the previous chapter, where the changing landscape in Berlioz’s “Euphonia” represents distinctions between German and Italian musical style. Similarly, Meredith perceives the “nation” as physically inherent – rooted in latitude – rather than being a cognitive process made possible by literacy and print capitalism. While Meredith’s fictions were extremely well known in the nineteenth century, it has long been the case that his works have fallen out of fashion, and thus I want to outline the plot of Sandra Belloni because it is possibly unfamiliar to most readers. The narrative takes place in England in the mid-1840s, but continually refers to Italy’s ongoing struggle with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The novel opens with the Pole siblings (Arabella, Cornelia, Adela, Wilfrid) and the Greek millionaire and music patron, Antonio Pericles, listening to Emilia Alessandra Belloni’s stunning singing and harp playing in the midst of a moonlit wood. After hearing her performance, the Poles and Pericles vie with each other to become Emilia’s patrons. Luckily, she chooses the Poles instead of the sexuallypredatory Pericles, and the Pole sisters attempt to earn social prestige by displaying the singer.13 Emilia and Wilfrid subsequently fall into a love based on misunderstandings: Emilia confuses her feelings for Wilfrid with her love of Italy, and Wilfrid cannot reconcile his attraction to Emilia with her lack of sentimentality. She, meanwhile, demonstrates sympathy not only for Italian liberation, but also for English laborers when she



Music, Climate Theory and the Working Classes


sings at a working-men’s club. Not long after, because of bad business investments, the Pole family desperately needs money. Wilfrid responds by enlisting in the Austrian army and engaging himself to the prosperous Lady Charlotte, who induces Emilia to eavesdrop on Wilfrid’s love-making to her. Emilia flees, disappearing in London, until she is found and cared for by two Italian sympathizers, the Welsh Merthyr Powys and his sister. To her horror, Emilia discovers that she has lost her voice, but she recovers it as she heals from her infatuation. Toward the end of the novel, she learns of the Poles’ fiscal problems and rescues them by staging a magnificent scene to which she separately invites several key individuals. Again she sings in a moonlit clearing (sans harp), Wilfrid is overcome and declares his love before the listening Lady Charlotte, and Emilia makes an agreement with Pericles that he underwrite the Poles if she attends the Milan conservatory. Emilia thus reverses her position as the Poles’ protégée, becoming instead their benefactor. Sandra Belloni is ultimately a female Bildungsroman, where domestic education and marriage are not the goals; the proto-feminist Emilia learns to seize her Italian heritage, both musically and politically.14

Italy as inspiration to British politics and literature Emilia is an adolescent resident in England in Sandra Belloni, but in Meredith’s sequel, Vittoria, she matures into the political spirit, voice and body of Young Italy. The two novels thus reveal an Anglo-Italian connection that existed at the time between the two nations. As Margot C. Finn shows in After Chartism, British mid-century interest in the Risorgimento occurred across class and party lines. In 1848 English working-class support for continental revolutions in France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Hungary served momentarily to unite liberals, Dissenters and Chartists at home. Although it was short-lived, English radicals believed themselves to be part of a single European reform movement.15 The British government also found Italy to be important enough that it worked to resolve problems faced by Italy in 1850s, as Harry Hearder documents in Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento 1790–1870, especially during Italian unification in 1859–1860.16 Reciprocally, Italians recognized England’s significance, with Camillo Cavour visiting industrialized England in the mid-thirties and Giuseppe Mazzini finding England a home during his lengthy exile.17 The 1860s were politically galvanizing as sympathy for revolutionary movements in Italy and Poland served to bring together middle- and working-class radicals in England, even if they diverged on other matters.



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Finn documents how this orientation toward nationalism had far-reaching results as it “established patterns of both discourse and organizational cooperation that laid the foundations for effective political reform activities in 1867.”18 But Italian nationalism was a cause that the upper classes also attempted to manipulate for their own purposes, as occurred during Giuseppe Garibaldi’s visit to London in 1864. While the affluent suggested that class unity was demonstrated during this event, working-class presses denied any connection between the Italian revolutionary hero and Britain’s ruling classes.19 In other words, the cause of Italian nationalism accentuated the presence of class fissures in England, despite the elite classes’ projection of the interaction between Garibaldi and the people as emblematizing the one nation ideal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given this political backdrop, the Risorgimento figured in Victorian fiction and poetry in a variety of ways. Referring to the period from 1815 to 1860, or from the Congress of Vienna to the unification of Italy, the Risorgimento also recalls an idealized Italian past made up of figures like Dante Alighieri and Savonarola.20 References to Dante are famously seen in D.G. Rossetti’s and Christina Rossetti’s poetry. Charles Reade’s most famous novel, The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), is set in medieval Italy, as is George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863), which has been seen to comment on the Risorgimento, not least in its focus on Savonarola.21 More explicitly, Wilkie Collins made the Risorgimento crucial to the climax of The Woman in White (1860) when the opera enthusiast Count Fosco is recognized as traitorous to “the Brotherhood.”22 Similarly, Giovanni Ruffini, a political exile and librettist for Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (1843), was known for novels published in English (1853– 1870), which expressed sympathy with the ideology of his friend Mazzini.23 The international popularity of his Doctor Antonio (1855) may have provided some of the best information to the public about current Italian politics in the mid-fifties.24 Publishing Sandra Belloni and Vittoria in the mid to late sixties, Meredith joins other writers in Britain who found in Italy an imaginative inspiration, if not also using their writing to popularize radical politics. Certainly, Italian nationalism was a cause that Meredith was passionately dedicated to, retrospectively calling the Risorgimento “the main historical fact of the 19th Century.”25 It is generally recognized that while Meredith may have claimed a non-partisan approach in both life and art, his poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose frequently communicate a radical position, expressive of patient effort toward social progress. This political position is represented in Meredith’s journalistic writing. He began contributing to the socialist weekly, the Leader, six months after it began in 1850. The Leader’s





politics supported moderate Chartism and bolder Radicalism, as the first issue explained, and it allowed Meredith an early outlet for his brand of gradualist politics.26 Later, he became associated with the Fortnightly Review, known for its Liberal position and for bringing together thinkers such as G.H. Lewes, John Morley, Leslie Stephen, T.H. Huxley and Frederick Maxse who supported the political positions of Gladstone, John Bright, J.S. Mill, Goldwin Smith and Herbert Spencer.27 As seen when examining Sandra Belloni and Vittoria together, this radicalism addressed both domestic class relations and the self-determinism of nations.

Interpreting the figure of the female harpist As an indication of Sandra Belloni’s political leanings, Meredith depicts Emilia’s music-making in two different scenes, establishing first the ignorance of the rising bourgeoisie and then, as I return to below, the natural insightfulness of the working classes and radical activists. In the first of these scenes, the Poles demonstrate their blindness when they cannot see the political implications of the emblem of the female harpist, familiar from Romantic literature. Thus the novel also comments on literary history, especially literature produced during a period when reading influenced political activism, particularly among the middle classes. But in Meredith’s fascinating narrative, the nouveau riche miss the motifs associated with that nationalist literature. This aspect of the novel becomes clear in the opening pages: Amid this desolation, a dwarfed pine, whose roots were partially bared as they grasped the broken bank that was its perch, threw far out a cedar-like hand. In the shadow of it sat the fair singer. A musing touch of her harp-strings drew the intruders to the charmed circle, though they could discern nothing save the glimmer of the instrument and one set of fingers caressing it. [ . . . ] The charm was now more human, though scarcely less powerful. This was a different song from the last: it was not the sculptured music of the old school, but had the richness and fulness of passionate blood that marks the modern Italian, where there is much dallying with beauty in the thick of sweet anguish. (9) Emilia’s performance begins with a song by seventeenth-century Italian composer Alessandro Stradella and ends with her own modern tunes. The protagonist’s music is infused with her “passionate blood” – it is a



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corporeal music expressing her national origin. Yet this impassioned music, played not in Italy but in the midst of the English countryside, is misunderstood by her English auditors. The Poles do not grasp the nationalist sentiment underlying the performance. The novel thus plays with the figure of political female harpers as found in Romantic literature like Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) and Walter Scott’s first novel, Waverley (1814). Corinne, a narrative about a female improvisator, sets the precedent for those novels that find political inspiration in the figure of female harpists. Sandra Belloni has many components in common with Corinne, including that both novels identify geography with national character and musical style, focus on revolutionary ideals, and concentrate on an Anglo-Italian woman of artistic genius who moves from England to Italy to become a famous performer. The link between Emilia and Corinne goes beyond the general idea of female artistry, however, since they are both female harpists. As an improvisator, Corinne is one of the declining number of rhapsodes who were still performing privately for aristocratic audiences in early nineteenth-century Italy.28 These performers were not musicians per se, but they did intone their poetic recitations, as Hans Christian Andersen observed in 1833. When the young Danish author attended an improvisatory evening given by fifteen poets at the Academia Tibernia in Italy, he reported: “Each recited his poem; most of them half sung it with the most dramatic gestures.”29 The “half sung” aspect is also stressed in Corinne when the heroine declaims not in the more usual “monotonous chant,” but with a “variety of tones,” which the narrator describes as “singing”30 in a language – Italian – that lends itself to melodiousness. Staël’s protagonist thus goes beyond normal expectations, especially because she chooses to accompany herself on a lyre that “closely resembled a harp” (28), thus referencing Sappho while also adding music to her chanting. Corinne, moreover, is actually musical: she shows herself to be a fine singer when she performs in an opera buffa, and indicates her yen to compose when she tells her Scottish lover, Oswald, Lord Neville, that she sometimes finds “chords and simple, national melodies” (46) to express herself more aptly than words. This music is specifically Italian, as “national melodies” indicates. Moreover, Italian music and land are explicitly tied in the novel. When Corinne and Oswald attend a concert in Rome, for instance, the narrator observes: “In Italy, voices have a gentle sweetness that recalls both the scent of flowers and the purity of the sky. Nature has destined this music for this climate; the one is like a reflection of the other” (161). Not only




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In our climate nothing is like the southern perfume of the lemon trees in the open countryside. It has almost the same effect on the imagination as melodious music; it makes you poetically inclined, stimulates talent, and intoxicates it with nature. (188) Going further than a synaesthetic blend of tuneful sound, country scents, and open vistas, the narrator equates the sensuality of land and music in how they inspire poetic talent. Music does not only literally support Corinne’s declamations through her crooning and strumming, but melody joins Italian land in being an imaginative inspiration underlying verse itself. Land is such a prominent feature of the book, as seen in Corinne and Oswald’s many excursions around Italy, that Staël’s novel is a piece of travel literature as much as a political statement, love story, and exploration of woman’s creativity. Therefore, even though Corinne does not play her harp in an isolated grove, the novel’s emphasis on music and Italian landscape as analogous is significant – a connection made even more obvious in subsequent fiction. The literary descendents of Corinne, which I turn to below, bestow iconographic stature upon the melodious land and national music when the harpist situates herself in the midst of a rustling, gurgling, or otherwise tuneful rural setting. We can layer on top of this musico-geographical understanding of Corinne’s mode of artistic expression the more usual, political interpretation put forth by critical studies. Kari E. Lokke astutely argues that Corinne’s enthusiasm is a “code word for French Revolutionary sympathies,”31 with the entire novel being “informed from beginning to end by the author’s concern for the furtherance of French revolutionary and republican aims in the face of the current imperial and repressive Napoleonic regime.”32 Lokke goes on to interpret Corinne not only through feminist criticism (an extraordinarily gifted female performer who disturbingly self-destructs after losing Oswald), but also in terms of historical allegory, where transcendent Corinne (French revolutionary ideals) meets melancholic Oswald (post-revolutionary realities). Corinne serves as an obvious model to Sandra Belloni’s pairing of female artistry with revolutionary fervor, although the latter novel orients itself toward the Risorgimento instead of the French Revolution. By including



does music remind listeners of the Italian countryside, but music and landscape are indeed synonymous, or “reflection[s] of the other.” The narrator remarks on their mirrored nature outside the metropolitan concert hall, too, when Corinne and Oswald tour the countryside near Naples:

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radical politics, Meredith returns more fully to Staël’s prototypical narrative than do other mid-nineteenth-century stories of extraordinarily talented women, which mostly emphasize the trouble that these characters have in achieving both marriage and vocation, or even simply surviving. One has to look no further than George Eliot’s earliest fiction for an array of such characters: the talented Italian singer Caterina of “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story” (1857) who dies of lovesickness; eloquent Dinah Morris in Adam Bede (1859) who marries Adam and gives up her inspired preaching; and Maggie Tulliver, so patently ahead of her times, who drowns in The Mill on the Floss (1860). Although George Eliot’s fiction often includes political dimensions, these heroines do not carry the revolutionary torch that Corinne and Emilia do. After paying tribute to Corinne, however, Meredith reconfigures the originary tale. Sandra Belloni may similarly begin with an entrancing female harpist, and go on to narrate Emilia’s loss of talent when her lover pursues another woman, but then Emilia recovers her voice and leaves for Italy to be properly trained – not for art’s sake, but to lead the patriotic cause in Vittoria. Meredith’s two novels thus work together to depict a new story that pays heed to literary tradition before suggesting that creative women can find artistic and political fulfillment. While Corinne performs in civilized settings an inspired verse that expresses national music, character and geography, later female harpists pluck and strum in the midst of wild countryside itself. Waverley’s Flora Mac-Ivor plays to the protagonist in a “land of romance” – a sublime landscape where she and her attendant seem like “inhabitants of another region.”33 In this craggy Highland setting Flora displays her Celtic music, and herself, to best advantage: as she possessed excellent sense, she gave the romance of the scene, and other accidental circumstances, full weight in appreciating the feelings with which Waverley seemed obviously to be impressed [ . . . ]. She therefore quietly led the way to a spot at such a distance from the cascade, that its sound should rather accompany than interrupt that of her voice and instrument (177) Utilizing the sound of the waterfall in the musical performance, Flora’s Highland battle song “harmonized well with the distant waterfall” and the “rustling leaves of an aspen” (178). Land and national song are indissolubly linked. Similarly, in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Glorvina, the Princess of Inismore, with her “witching strain,” encourages Horatio




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he listened to those strains which spoke once to the heart of the father, the patriot, and the man – breathed from the chords of his country’s emblem – breathed in the pathos of his country’s music – breathed from the lips of his apparently inspired daughter! The “white rising of her hands upon the harp;” the half-drawn veil, that imperfectly discovered the countenance of a seraph; the moon-light that played round her fine form, and partially touched her drapery with its silver beam – her attitude! her air!34 The ruined castle, set by the ocean under “the evening star,” is as “sublime” (51) as the scene in Waverley, and it similarly combines Celtic music with national icons (the Irish harp), and music (“air”) with the player’s attitude (“air”). Horatio responds rapturously, just as Wilfrid Pole does when he witnesses Emilia’s woodland playing in Meredith’s novel. At the nighttime performance toward the end of Sandra Belloni, Wilfred exclaims, “Do I know what I love, you ask? I love your footprints! Everything you have touched is like fire to me. Emilia! Emilia!” (481). Abundant exclamation points communicate heightened feeling in both Owenson’s and Meredith’s narratives. Meredith’s novel thus concentrates attention on a powerful literary motif – the nationalist harpist and landscape – that has precursors in Corinne, Waverley, The Wild Irish Girl and even Charles Maturin’s The Milesan Chief (1812). In the last, Armida Fitzalban’s bewitching, costumed performances (first Persian, then Greek) for her father’s guests are followed by plucking her harp in a remote garden nook, where she admits to the observing Wandesford that she wanted to sing her translation of a poem by Ossian “amid scenery that would have recalled the sombrous imagery and luxurious melancholy of the bard.”35 The Anglo-Italian heroine thus interacts with a process begun by James Macpherson in his collecting, translating, editing, and forgery of bardic verse, made available to the public as Poems of Ossian (1760–1765). As Katie Trumpener observes in Bardic Nationalism, the Macpherson publications sparked discussion and controversy to the end of the century, not least among Irish nationalists who were incensed to find the Ossianic poems suggesting a Scottish origin to Irish literature.36 Because Armida provides her own translations instead of relying on Macpherson’s, she positions herself as participating in an Irish cause. Moreover, by performing verse that was originally orally transmitted, she more authentically recreates



to peep through the window of an Irish castle, where he finds her serenading her father:

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Ossian than do Macpherson’s printed versions. So while in the first pages of The Milesan Chief, Armida seems simply to entrance her future fiancé with “her beauty, heightened as it was by the scenery” (23), the scene really sets the stage for what will become an explicit national tale of Ireland.37 And yet Meredith’s novel differs from the works discussed above because, in concentrating only on Emilia, Wilfrid ignores the nationalist elements of the harp-in-nature figure, only too apparent in Flora’s loyalty to the Jacobite uprising of 1745, Glorvina’s association with Ireland in the Act of Union, and Emilia’s participation in the militant cause of Young Italy – the secret society of those followers of Mazzini who were readying Italy for revolution. Meredith essentially probes the confusion between form and matter in Sandra Belloni, and this exploration echoes and revises Scott’s treatment of similar themes in Waverley. Not only is bardic performance a means of enacting national unity and identity across class divisions and time, as Trumpener argues,38 but music often signals sentiment and then reworks it into an expression of nationalism. In the introductory chapter to Waverley; or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, Scott discusses his choice of subtitle, describing how if he had instead selected “A Sentimental Tale,” the subtitle would have “been a sufficient presage of a heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of transporting from castle to cottage” (34). Scott ridicules sentimental fiction, by which he means a genre that emphasized emotional responsiveness, but then, in one of the first historical novels, Scott depicts the same scene. Waverley, however, references the motif only to demonstrate the protagonist’s interpretative errors. Reading inspires Waverley’s initial response to Flora at her harp, as the narrator describes: “The wild beauty of the retreat, bursting upon him as if by magic, augmented the mingled feeling of delight and awe with which he approached her, like a fair enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto” (177). Geography directly stimulates Waverley’s imagination regarding Boiardo and Ariosto, and Flora herself of course extends the tradition of Romantic female harpist in sublime landscape: I have given you the trouble of walking to this spot, Captain Waverley, both because I thought the scenery would interest you, and because a Highland song would suffer still more from any imperfect translation, were I to introduce it without its own wild and appropriate accompaniments. To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic music is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain stream. (177)





Flora is as aware as Maturin’s Armida of scenery’s importance for picturesque effect. However, as Ian Duncan notices in Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel, Flora is not just the ahistorical personification of “Celtic muse” and the secret glen is far from isolated politically; Flora is also the “spirit of the Jacobite Cause” and Waverley fails to discern the allegory.39 He thinks he witnesses only “Highland Minstrelsy,” as the chapter is entitled, or a bardic memory of Scottish history, rather than a political, present moment where the clan would literally write him into the events when his name is included in the song that Flora performs. Meredith not only echoes Scott; he revises his precursor’s famous novel just as he did Corinne. Wilfrid is like his predecessor in misreading national performance: neither Wilfrid nor his sisters hear Emilia’s voice as the voice of Italy. The Poles color the forest scene with sentimental interpretation, thereby misunderstanding reality, just as Waverly had done. But Waverley learns to hear the patriotic call while Wilfrid does not. Moreover, Scott’s hero is one of the landed gentry, whereas Meredith’s main characters belong to the newly affluent middle classes whose identity relies, in part, on regarding life sentimentally. The political implications of Emilia’s music are perhaps lost on the Poles because for them to understand Emilia’s Italian music as linked to democratic ideals would be to question their own belief in the class ladder, which they are so anxious to climb. They concentrate only on the sentimentality of the harpistin-nature, missing the point that Emilia, daughter of an Italian political refugee and first-violinist of the Italian opera, and great-niece of the fictional composer Andronizetti, has literally inherited both Italy’s music and its political fervor. By failing to grasp the Romantic tradition that informs Emilia’s performance, the Poles may also simply demonstrate the narrowness of bourgeois understanding. The female harpist in an English setting is not, in the minds of her politically ignorant middle-class listeners, understood as any other than an aurally and visually enchanting individual (an artist). The narrative thus highlights the provincial understandings of the Poles, despite their desire to portray themselves as cultured and cosmopolitan. If they had a more worldly understanding of non-English nationalist traditions (Scotland, Ireland, Italy), then they would perhaps comprehend the political power integral to the icon of the woman harp-player. However, when they become bankrupt, the Poles’ desire to indulge in sentimentality must finally give way to dealing with harsh economic realities. It is Emilia, the object of their enthusiasms, who not only resists their fanciful depiction of herself, but finally saves them fiscally when she embraces the public world in the form of her professional singing



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career and her Italian nationalist politics. Rather than pursue a marriage plot, the novel traverses the private and public realms, moving from depictions of imaginative solitude and sentimentality to scenes of fiscal and political reality. In the final pages, Emilia demonstrates her maturation when she stages a musical performance in a moonlit grove. A nighttime concert references the opening performance, but because her auditors appeared without her knowledge the first time, while being separately invited the second time, her new ability to manipulate and aid the English is made clear. Emilia thus learns what Corinne in Corinne, ou l’Italie, Armida Fitzalban in The Milesan Chief, Fiona Mac-Ivor in Waverley and even Mary Crawford in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) know: how adroitly to turn a musical scene to her own advantage – a handy skill in Vittoria where Emilia and her voice are the agents of power.40

The body in Sandra Belloni Sandra Belloni connects the misinterpretation of fictional motifs with the rising bourgeoisie, and the novel likewise links the discourse of automatic or corporeal responsiveness with people who understand correctly and therefore hold the key to positive national growth. Physiological associationism suggested an interaction between mind and body, as seen in reflexive actions, but it also went a step further to posit that the workings of the individual body are seen in the social body; national evolution is dependent upon individual development. Therefore, when Meredith’s novel identifies sentimentalism as the “natural growth” (5) of rich communities, this state of being reflects badly not only on the Pole family, but also on England. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophies, Sandra Belloni portrays individuals and civilization as degenerating with the accumulation of wealth. I shall return to the connection with Rousseau, as Meredith demonstrates an affinity with the French radical’s beliefs about music’s place in the civic development of Northern and Southern peoples, the body, and its automatic actions. The novel does not specifically address Dissent, Chartism or the liberal left in England, but in criticizing the affluent classes while praising the supporters of Young Italy, it demonstrates a radical orientation. This political focus is expressed through other international events, too. Beyond being a bourgeois English family, the Poles have imperial leanings in their military connections to India and Austria. Even though J.S. Stone suggests that the Poles support Austria because they believe it to be an aristocratic choice since a gentlemanly relative, Colonial Pierson, serves in the Austrian cavalry,41 the family had already demonstrated imperialist





affinities through Wilfrid’s Indian service in the pre-history to the novel. More to the point, because the Pole family serves Austria, they place themselves on the opposing side to the Italian revolution. Perhaps the alliance to Austria is natural given Mr Pole’s Austro-German idea of what affluence means, demonstrated when he describes his “little estate” of suburban Brookfield to Purcell Barrett: “You’ve seen plenty bigger in Germany, and England too.” He then invites the organist to dinner with the proud explanation: “Plain dinner, you know. Nothing like what you get at the tables of those Erzhogs, as you call ’em over in Germany” (44). Mr Pole means the Esterházys, the Hungarian nobles who were patrons of Joseph Haydn during the second half of the eighteenth century. Pole’s sense of cultural prestige comes not only from wealth, but also from artistic patronage, which he associates with Germanic states, even if he demonstrates his very lack of cultural awareness by mispronouncing Esterházy and identifying them as German. Just as the novel connects the wealthy English with imperial forces, so it aligns the English poor with Italy. In contrast to Pole’s grand ideas of the Austrian army and the “German” Esterházys, he defines Italians as “foreign rascals” and a “set of swindlers!” (195, 196). Pole’s statements demonstrate the prejudices of the well-heeled Briton – statements that are supported by an anonymous Englishman who comments after the Lombard revolt: Yes! those Italians are absurd: they never were a people: never agreed. Egad! the only place they’re fit for is the stage. Art! if you like. They know all about colouring canvas, and sculpturing. I don’t deny ’em their merits, and I don’t mind listening to their squalling, now and then: though, I’ll tell you what: – have you ever noticed the calves of those singers? – I mean, the men. Perhaps not – for they’ve got none. They’re sticks, not legs. [ . . . ] just look at their legs, ma’am, and ask yourself whether there’s much chance for a country that stands on legs like those! (484–5; original emphasis) To some extent, Italy’s comparison with the leg is accounted for by the country’s boot-like shape – a common association at the time.42 Meredith’s subsequent handling of Sir Willoughby Patterne’s English “leg” in The Egoist (1879), however, sheds even more useful light on the citation. In the author’s most famous novel, epithets are applied as the main characters are introduced and these attributes then become repeating motifs. Upon the day of his majority, the egoist Patterne is dubbed with the phrase, “You see he has a leg,”43 which identifies his attaining manhood



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with a phallic allusion. The narrator elaborates over several pages, explaining how the epithet embodies the conceit of the noble cavalier who gracefully displays his leg when bowing. Ultimately, having a “leg” wittily references the bygone glory of England’s landed gentry; the “leg” is an anachronistic “lute to scatter songs to [the cavalier’s] mistress” (12), unlike modern, moral England. In the passage above, criticizing Italian “legs” differentiates the English worship of class from Mediterranean revolution. Italy may be known for its singing, painting, and sculpting, but art cannot compare to the scraping bow of English cavalier who acknowledges his place in the class hierarchy, displays his cultivated person, and uses the lute/leg in romantic conquests. The point about class is emphasized in Sandra Belloni when the Italian people lack the principles of organization (“never agreed”), unlike the firmly ordered English class system. The speaker effectively suggests that agitation and self-determination have not a leg to stand on, and that “sticks” and effeminate squalling are no comparison to the English phallus. The Englishman’s opinion in the quotation does not express Sandra Belloni’s orientation, however, since Emilia’s “squalling” binds the people together. Moreover, the narrator demonstrates that English culture is itself inherently fractious by presenting it as a series of military skirmishes. The narrative uses the lexicon of war throughout, whether it is the battle between the Poles and their neighbors the Tinleys, the antagonism of the Pole sisters against an Irish widow who has attracted their father’s amorous attention, the commanding of a lawn party, or courtship victories. The laboring classes are not left out from this portrayal of clashes and strife, for when Emilia sings at the annual feast-day for the Junction Club of Ipley and Hillford, a riot erupts. Just as the anonymous Englishman associated singing with social squabbles, the most disruptive activity of the novel happens at a concert. This mob, however, only forms because of the interruption to the collectivity of response that the working-class audience had been experiencing. Unlike the upper classes, English laborers are represented as simultaneously able to form a nationalist collective and able to riot, similar to the depiction of Italian patriots in Vittoria. Riots at mid-Victorian concerts were not unusual events, and violent conflicts between bands at competition festivals sometimes happened.44 Frequently, disturbances erupted because not every audience member listened quietly to the “music”; some viewed the performance as an “event” to see and be seen. Since audiences sometimes evinced bad behavior, concert venues frequently responded with attempts at group management. As early as 1846, the front page of the Musical Union’s Synopsis





Analytique began carrying the directions, “[t]here will be an interval of ten minutes between each piece of music, to allow members an opportunity of leaving, without disturbing the audience during the performances.”45 Crystal Palace program notes show that this practice of arriving late and leaving early was so normal that in the 1860s and 1870s the pieces programmed first and last frequently received only scanty coverage; the program often indicated a five-minute interval not only before the last number, but also after the first.46 This rule was most probably meant to apply to fashionable members of the audience who were more concerned with avoiding the rush for the doors than with hearing the full program. Such is the conclusion of an article on “English Audiences” in the September 1885 Musical Times: “An amusing feature of these [Hallé’s] Concerts is the Northern frankness with which the occupants of the shilling seats express their disapproval of the stampede which invariably sets in amongst the stall-holders about half-an-hour before the close of these Concerts.”47 What is unusual in musical audiences as compared to other nineteenth-century groups and methods of social ordering is that where the wealthy had to be trained, indeed restrained from their “stampede,” those who could only afford the “shilling seats” attempted to correct this lapse in etiquette. Probably, those occupying the cheap seats were those members of works bands and sight-singing classes who had been taught to value music itself over the socializing opportunities, as I discussed in the introduction and first chapter. In Sandra Belloni, Emilia’s concert degenerates into gang violence, but it differs from the disruptions discussed by professional musicians above because the club members neither attend polite concerts, nor do they participate in the mass-music movement. Instead, they play “noise” coming from a drum, trombone, horn and fife, causing Emilia to screw up her face “at the nerve-searching discord” (54). Further, when Emilia agrees to sing for them, she defends the natural rights of the poor to hear beautiful song because they “never hear anything but dreadful music – not music at all, but something that seems to tear your flesh!” (61). Neither the Ipley nor the Hillford Club musicians are represented as welltrained workers who participate in mass-music initiatives, thus suggesting a different narrative about music-making and the laboring classes than that documented by national music movements. The problems at the concert spring from the fact that Ipley beat Hillford in exacting the expected annual charity contribution from wealthy landowners and the resulting drunken brawl is precisely the sort of behavior that mass-music movements, with their frequent temperance message, were trying to eradicate. In Meredith’s fiction, however, this conduct is not used to support



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philanthropic music movements initiated by the higher classes. Quite the contrary. The concert scene is important because, besides depicting the very social disorder occurring at mid-century public events that rational education movements were supposed to help alleviate, it reveals the presence of a different discourse: how national music was perceived either to order or overcome people. As Chapter 2 describes, in the early seventies Erewhon developed the idea of cultural invasion occurring through music, but an even earlier example occurs in Meredith’s novel, when music is presented as an instrument of imperial expansion. In Sandra Belloni, the narrator satirically explains that the aim of the Hillford club was “simply to furnish the offending Ipley boys a little music. [ . . . ] Hillford had nothing to do with consequences: no more than our England is responsible when she sails out among the empires and hemispheres, saying, “buy” and “sell,” and they clamour to be eaten up entire” (72). In consequence, Hillford’s din of drum, trombone, horn, “two whistles, and a fife” (73) overwhelms Emilia’s singing to harp accompaniment: In dismay, Ipley started. The members of the Club stared. Emilia faltered in horror. A moment her voice swam stemming the execrable concert, but it was overwhelmed. [ . . . ] They could hear nothing but the din. The booth raged like an insurgent menagerie. Outside it sounded of brazen beasts, and beasts that whistled, and beasts that boomed. [ . . . ] Unprovided with weapons, Ipley parleyed. Hillford howled in reply. The trombone brayed an interminable note, that would have driven to madness quiescent cats by steaming kettles, and quick, like the springing pulse of battle, the drum thumped and thumped. Blood could not hear it and keep from boiling. (79–80) Hillford represents England in this satire on empire, so it is odd that this Club is described in denigrating, disruptive terms as “beasts” and an “insurgent menagerie,” except that the imperial army is associated with the affluent English, and Meredith’s novel criticizes the privileged classes. The other club, representing the colonized country, is enjoying Emilia’s music. Then noise, which disturbs musical enjoyment, causes a maddened brawl. Similarly, as considered above, journalists described how audibly disruptive concert audiences were like mobs, with the (noisy) elite identified as the insurgents. Fist-fights and broken furniture may not have resulted at these events, but it is noteworthy that the idea of mob,





concert and empire are linked in Sandra Belloni; communities and nations are portrayed as struggling for dominance through music. The brawl, however, only occurs at the cessation of melodious sound; music itself is not depicted as inciting a crowd response, as occurs in later fiction such as George Du Maurier’s Trilby.48 Before the quarrel, the working class’s joyful response to music demonstrates a collectivity different from the discourses that I have discussed thus far. The laboring poor are passionately influenced by nationalist music, aligning them alongside Italy’s brand of nationalism and against that of the well-to-do English, who are erroneously more influenced by sentiment. Not participating in rational education movements, the collective audience response is different from the self-disciplined, analytic listening of an audience guided by the values of the music establishment. Here, collective behavior is discussed as class-based, natural and passionate when Emilia sings repertoire that has intrinsic musical and textual value for the people. Linking nation with music is not merely a metaphor in Sandra Belloni. Rather, the novel illustrates conceptualizations of music as inherently national and full of meaning when based on passion, as seen in contrasting Emilia’s first programming choices at the Club concert with her later repertoire. She adjusts her program precisely because she desires to elicit an impassioned response in the audience. When Emilia begins to sing, the narrator describes the audience as facing her; open-mouthed, some of them: but for the most part wearing a predetermined expression of applausive judgement, as who should say, “Queer, but good.” They gave Emilia their faces, which was all she wanted! and silence, save for an intermingling soft snore, here and there, the elfin trumpet of silence. [ . . . ] Yet, though the words were foreign and the style of the song and the singer were strange, many of the older fellows’ eyes twinkled, and their mouths pursed with a kind of half-protesting pleasure. All were reverent to the compliment paid them by Emilia’s presence. The general expression was much like that seen when the popular ear is given to the national anthem. [ . . . ] Emilia may have had some warning sense that admiration is only one ingredient of homage, that to make it fast and true affection must be won. Now, poor people, yokels, clods, cannot love what is incomprehensible to them. An idol must have their attributes: a king must show his face now and then: a song must appeal to their intelligence, to subdue them quite. (76–7)



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Emilia’s program includes Italian music without indicating its style or age. Not only does the passage show the people responding dutifully, as if they were listening to the national anthem (itself a telling statement about working-class patriotism),49 but it also emphasizes how unsatisfactory this response is to the passionate Emilia. Throughout the novel, she desires to please the people, even literally dreaming of an Italian crowd who all “[cry] out to me that I had caught their hearts” (161). Emilia, therefore, decides to sing an English tune which will “appeal to their intelligence” and “affection”: No sooner had Emilia struck a prelude of the well-known air, than the interior of the booth was transfigured; legs began to move, elbows jerked upward, fingers fillipped: the whole body of them were ready to duck and bow, dance, and do her bidding: she had fairly caught their hearts. For, besides the pleasure they had in their own familiar tune, it was wonderful to them that Emilia should know what they knew. [ . . . ] She smiled to see how true she had struck, and seemed to swim on the pleasure she excited. [ . . . ] At the “thrum-thrum” on the harp-strings, which wound up the song, frenzied shouts were raised for a repetition. Emilia was perfectly willing to gratify them (78) The frenzy elicited is quite different from the bestial outrage that occurs when Hillford arrives. When Ipley listens to Emilia’s singing, it is described as a “whole body” that comes together “to do her bidding.” Yet this is not the language of crowd psychology, which would envision the crowd as sharing the same images and ideas. Rather, “pleasure” brings the people together and coordinates them into a dance. Their enjoyment is dependent upon repertoire and upon Emilia instilling value in working-class culture by performing a song that they associate with themselves. Meredith thus brings class awareness to ideas about collective activity, implying that the working classes can coordinate as a group, unlike the fractious bourgeoisie and nobility. The laborers respond in ways not only different from the more educated, “sentimental” English, but also much closer to the natural state of society described in Rousseau’s writings on music, national language and bodily response. The working-class audience responds with an automatic reaction to the music: “No sooner” does Emilia begin the popular song, than “elbows jerked” and “fingers fillipped.” This reflexivity promotes dancing rather than a rioting mob; it is not bestial until Hillford noisily arrives. The scene therefore combines notions of music’s power to incite automatic action with Rousseau’s





influential idea in his posthumously published Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781) of melody being an emotional communication. Rousseau’s theories were hugely important for Victorian anthropology, which, concerned with the development of the human brain and the evolution of language over time, found music to be significant because it was perceived to share the same source as language. In particular, Rousseau discusses how music was social in nature; melody is as much a means of communicative exchange as language. When one of our forebears was moved by passions (love, hate, pity, anger), Rousseau argued that voiced sounds resulted.50 These first articulations then developed over time into cadences and syllables, giving music and language the same source.51 Not only does music express human feeling and become central to the formation of primitive social fabrics, but Rousseau’s earlier monograph, Lettre sur la musique française (1753), gave a national configuration to this process. The ninety-two-page letter contains the seeds of his philosophy of language, music and human society’s anthropological and historical origins, which he later developed in Essai sur l’origine des langues.52 Indeed, Downing A. Thomas makes a strong case for considering the Essai as part of a larger project, not only because ideas on music thread through many of Rousseau’s publications, but also because the philosopher had planned to publish together first the Lettre, then the Examen de deux principes avancés par M. Rameau (1755), and finally the Essai. In contemplating the oeuvre, the emphasis shifts away from thinking about Rousseau’s ideas solely in terms of music, or only in terms of language, society, and culture. Rather, multiple discourses work together in Rousseau’s publications.53 As part of “La Querelle des Bouffons,” which debated the merits of Italian and French music, Rousseau’s letter argues so strenuously in favor of Italian opera as to make French music virtually worthless.54 He proposes that there is such a thing as national music and that “every National Music derives its principal character from the language to which it belongs.”55 Because the Italian language has mellifluous words with clear accents, he claimed that it is suited to music in a way that French language, with its nasal and monotonous sounds, is not.56 Similar ideas were then worked out in subsequent publications, such as Rousseau’s Essai and his widely-known Dictionnaire de Musique (1768), sections of which were translated into English in 1769 and appended to Grassineau’s Musical Dictionary. One of the entries describes “melody,” which Rousseau divides into two principles: According to this [first] principle, all the force of melody is confined to the pleasing of the ear by agreeable sounds [ . . . ]



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What then is this second principle? [ . . . ] This principle is the same as that which occasions the variation of tone in the voice in conversation, according to the subject on which we converse, and the emotions that we feel in the discourse. It is the accent of languages that determines the melody of each nation; it is the accent that makes us sing in talking; and we express ourselves with more or less energy, according as the language has more or less accent. That, where the accent is strongest, must give a more lively and expressive melody; and that, which has little or no accent, must have a languid and dull melody, without character and without expression. These are the true principles; and when men depart from these, and talk about the power of music on the human mind, they talk without meaning; they know not what they say.57 National language gives nations melody and, reciprocally, citizens respond to national music as a language. As John T. Scott writes about Rousseau’s theories, “music is a semantic system, a language of the passions communicated through the inflections of the melody.”58 Scott goes on to discuss how music and language are cultural phenomena to Rousseau that demonstrate the “nature”59 of a nation’s people and imply ideas that are developed in the second Discours (Discours sur l’inégalité [1755] ), while I suggest that Rousseau’s thoughts not only allow us to glimpse the people’s nature, but they also purport language and national identity to be rooted in nature, climate and geography – not books. To Rousseau, latitudinal difference is ultimately responsible for differences in musical style and language. The philosopher thus joins a preexisting discourse that associates national character and political life with the bodily effects of hot and cold climates. As Roberto M. Dainotto delineates, climate theory is commonly discussed in association with CharlesLouis de Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), which brings together ideas of climate, land and human characteristics to suggest that southern heat produces passionate, amoral characters, while northern people are sincere and industrious. In De l’esprit des lois, society forms because of humanity’s need to band together to survive harsh climates – an effect mostly found in the north where the cold drives people together into coherent, cooperative societies. In contrast, the south remains natural, barbaric, passionate.60 Rousseau builds from the discourse of climate, retaining the notion of progression in civilization from south to north, but reversing the idea of which is better; “civilized” northern countries are now more corrupt than the emotional, natural south. Additionally, unlike Montesquieu, Rousseau considers linguistics and music. In short, Rousseau argues that it is not





only nation, but also national language, music, and social evolution that spring from land and climate, with a sharp division occurring between people north and south of the Alps. Just as the notion of latitudinal difference was part of a recognized tradition that nineteenth-century English novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell utilized,61 Rousseau’s ideas about the passions, national language, and music were not accidental presences in Victorian writing. Rather, they saturated discussions of musical aesthetics in the second half of the century. As Stephen Banfield suggests, these ideas can be traced through the publications of William Mason, William Crotch, William Gardiner and, most significantly, Herbert Spencer.62 Like Rousseau, Spencer focuses on the origin and evolution of human expression in his hugely influential article, “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857), but he adds to this an understanding of evolutionary biology. Music, he suggests, produces physiological actions, emotions and associations in all human beings, and our pleasure in music comes from an acquired association between sound and feelings. Therefore, contrary to the perhaps more common nineteenthcentury emphasis on music as inherently different from literature and visual art because of its non-representational qualities, to Spencer music is representational: it communicates a “natural language of the emotions,” and is seen as an “intensified and systematized” form of “emotional speech.”63 Moreover, song is not only an evolved form of the inflections of speech, but a sign of civilization and evolution. The development of social fabrics and methods of communication are ideas found in Rousseau’s discussion of melody, too, but unlike Rousseau, Spencer posits a trajectory of evolution and progress, not decline. Spencer also shares with Rousseau a belief that national language and musical style are inherently linked: May we not say, for instance, that the Italians, among whom modern music was earliest cultivated, and who have more especially practised and excelled in melody (the division of music with which our argument is chiefly concerned) – may we not say that these Italians speak in more varied and expressive inflections and cadences than any other nation? On the other hand, may we not say that, confined almost exclusively as they have hitherto been to their national airs, which have a marked family likeness, and therefore accustomed to but a limited range of musical expression, the Scotch are unusually monotonous in the intervals and modulations of their speech. And again, do we not find among different classes of the same nation, differences that have like implications?64



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Although Spencer’s examples of servant girl and accomplished lady demonstrate a marked preference for the upper classes, he still argues that music helps the growth of emotional language and so aids social evolution because “these modifications of voice produced by feelings, are the means of exciting like feelings in others [ . . . ] and so enable the hearer not only to understand the state of mind they accompany, but to partake of that state. In short, they are the chief media of sympathy.”65 Spencer is discussing social cohesion; people join together through common feeling, which he defines as a mark of an evolved civilization. Music is placed at the top of the hierarchy of the arts because it most “ministers to human welfare.”66 Similarly, in Meredith’s novel, public persuasion and collective response result from text and tune working together in order to communicate a language of pleasure. Sandra Belloni, emphasizing vocal music, is oriented differently from Austro-German music ideals, which particularly praised absolute (instrumental) music. At the club-day feast, Emilia moves her audience, but only when she sings in English. Aware of this, she urgently petitions an audience member for the words, “I remember the song you like, and I want to sing it. I know the tune, but the words! the words! what are the words? Humming won’t do” (77). A unified people results not only from hearing her beautiful voice, but also from listening to national music joined with national language.67 Significantly, Ipley responds to the familiarity of words and tune rather than to specific political lyrics. This concept differs from an idea frequently put forth about opera, which is seen as existing at a remove from the audience when it is sung in a foreign language or without clear diction. Catherine Clément calls it “[r]isk-free identification” when the audience can enjoy without letting messages in the plot concern them.68 But in Sandra Belloni, the message of the words is not important in generating communal response; national language and regional tune are the crucial elements. It is pleasurable precisely because of aspects of identification, but the ensuing action is far from “risk-free,” as seen in the violence resulting Ipley’s interrupted pleasure. Latitude, as a literal way of perceiving national difference in verse, song and speech, also sheds light on the nineteenth-century music profession’s debates about national style: it suggests that compositional and performance styles could be perceived as inherent and inherited as well as learned. Meredith’s novel reflects the former belief when Emilia tells Wilfrid that she yearned to take singing lessons because I could pitch any notes, and I was clear: but I was always ornamenting, and what I want is to be an accurate singer. My music-master was




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Not only is Emilia’s singing style naturally “always ornamenting,” but her compositional style is also national. The latter is implied earlier in the novel, too, when Pericles first hears Emilia sing: he comments on her song as “[i]t is Italian – yes, I swear it is Italian! But – who then? It is superbe [sic]!” (10). Only then does Emilia identify herself as the composer. Moreover, Emilia must labor to be an “accurate singer,” or true to the score. While heavy embellishments would have been encouraged in Italy, they were not considered appropriate in mid-century England, especially under German tutelage. It is surely easier to sing the music as written instead of inventing decoration, but because Emilia has so much difficulty not ornamenting, performance practice and compositional style are depicted as corporeal, a part of the (national) body and intimately linked to land. As the opening of the present chapter proposes, the female harpist does not merely perform in Romantic settings, but the land itself infuses her character and music. Further, embodying nation in musical style means that performing different styles signifies real or desired relationships between nations. Certainly, the oppressed Italians in Sandra Belloni protest Austrian hegemony, including Viennese music. Yet in a century that worships Beethoven, this orientation presents some problems. Introduced by her teacher to Beethoven’s music, Emilia responds with bewilderment because “I could not believe such music could come from a German” (34–5). It also enslaves her, as she informs Wilfrid: Don’t you know that dreadful man I told you about, who’s like a black angel to me, because there is no music like his? and he’s a German! I told you how I first dreamed about him, and then regularly every night, after talking with my father about Italy and his black-yellow Tedeschi, this man came over my pillow and made me call him Master, Master. And he is. He seems as if he were the master of my soul, mocking me, making me worship him in spite of my hate. I came here, thinking only of you. I heard the water like a great symphony. I fell into dreaming of my music. That’s when I am at his mercy. There’s no one like him. I must detest music to get free from him. [ . . . ] I am sure you will not remember any of his pieces. I wish I could not – not that it’s the memory; but he seems all round me, up in the air, and when the trees move all together [ . . . ]



a German – not an Austrian – oh, no! – I’m sure he was not. [ . . . ] I began to compose, and this gentleman tore up the whole sheet in a rage, when I showed it him (34)


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The passage is remarkable for again bringing together geography and music as Emilia listens to natural sounds that metamorphose into composition. Thinking about music leads her to Beethoven whom she associates with international politics because, although German by birth, his compositional style built from Viennese classicism. Thus in the first paragraph Emilia contrasts her father’s Italian patriotism with her unwilling worship of Austro-German music, while in the last she compares herself to oppressed Italy. In Sandra Belloni both the affluent English and professional musicians understand music in terms of power dynamics; while the former look down on Italian singers, the latter compare compositional schools to imperial domination. Of course, politics and musical style were also linked in Charles Auchester, Erewhon and “Euphonia,” where fidelity to the score meant allegiance to the composer, and composers were then conflated with civic leaders who governed smoothly functioning communities that stressed discipline and rules. Such a configuration, however, does not fit Italy, which rebels against Hapsburg occupation just as the Italian practice of ornamentation expresses freedom from the scored notation, or the ruled staff. Unlike Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined community as based on publications, Italian nationalism revolts against the idea of print capitalism. Neither its singers nor its improvisatori give power to the printed page, but rather express themselves in ways that exist off the page, while remaining communal. Thus in mid-Victorian fiction, novels’ political orientations are often figured as supporting Italian or Austro-German musical practices. While Charles Auchester, Erewhon and “Euphonia” emphasized fidelity to the composer, in Sandra Belloni composer and performer combine in the protagonist, suggesting again Emilia’s descent from the improvisator Corinne. And like the Italian singer’s performance style, where a soloist’s embellishments serve as a sort of composition in addition to the scored notes, Emilia combines these elements in her own person. In Vittoria, however, Emilia (Vittoria) is solely a prima donna; she no longer composes although she continues her florid singing. She transforms from Sandra Belloni, where she is anticipated as “Italy in the flesh” (319), to the voice, body and soul of Young Italy. Vittoria develops these images, placing the action in Italy rather than England. The new setting allows Vittoria to perform nationalist music, not in moonlit English copses before the sentimental English,



My English lover! I am like Italy, in chains to that German, and you . . . but no, no, no! It’s not quite a likeness, for my German is not a brute. (158–9)


but rather on the stage of Milan’s opera house, La Scala, surrounded by Italian patriots struggling against Hapsburg hegemony. In this setting, Vittoria’s musical actions can be nationalist on a scale that is unsupported by English operatic tradition. Vittoria’s music can also be “read” correctly because Italian audiences, similar to those at the Ipley Club concert, respond passionately to a national sound that they recognize. Linked to land and inspiring physiological responses, this corporeal music is presented as a more trustworthy semiotic system than that found in literary history, with its sentimental motifs. In experimenting with prose style, Meredith continues to explore these issues, as when he inserts opera libretto into the pages of Vittoria during the most feeling moments, which the narrator identifies as approximating the spirit of the opera and Risorgimento. Music is impassioned communication, which the La Scala audience cannot fail to react to genuinely. By this orientation, Meredith anticipates the distrust of intellectual interpretations of art that are voiced more loudly later in the century by writers like G.B. Shaw and Edmund Gurney, who find passionate responsiveness to music most genuine. It may seem odd to make largely illiterate communities’ responses to music more reliable than the reading public’s interpretations of literature, and then communicate these ideas within fiction. Prose literature was, after all, perceived as one way of forming imagined communities during this period. The paradox may be explained, however, because Meredith mistrusted the interpretative ability of his readers. In an 1864 letter to Augustus Jessopp, he expressed doubts about the public’s response to Sandra Belloni’s conclusion, hoping for “a critic to interpret me to the multitude,”69 and by the 1880s he was writing that “Readers of Novels read not for the sake of judging human nature but to escape from it.”70 The audience is at fault, not the medium, just as Sandra Belloni depicts the inability of the sentimental middle and upper classes to interpret human nature; fiction and life contain more than the public perceives. Meredith’s distrust does not mean that he did not hope for success, however. Anticipating Vittoria’s release, he wrote to a close friend, the radical Frederick Maxse: “I have done nothing of mark. But I shall, and Vittoria will be the first indication (if not fruit) of it.”71 Meredith’s marker of success was precisely public reception, as demonstrated in his correspondence with Algernon Charles Swinburne after the novel’s release: “Vittoria passes to the limbo where the rest of my works repose.”72 His fiction is in “limbo,” not speaking to a reading community. Yet Meredith still imagined how art could unite people – not through imagination and sentiment, but through embodied, passionate response.



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Moving from private to public thus occurs on multiple levels in Sandra Belloni: the novel narrates the Poles’ flawed sentimentality in the face of fiscal realities and Emilia’s movement toward her political destiny, while the novel itself progresses from writer’s desk to public consumption. Following on from these considerations, the next chapter includes an exploration of how the reading public’s interpretative capabilities are encouraged in Vittoria, with music once again a helpmate in this process.





Sandra Belloni’s and Vittoria’s respective depictions of mid-century revolutionary events would have been quite topical to an England monitoring 1860s Italy, and in both novels music plays a decisive role in swaying the people.1 But while Sandra Belloni treats an individual’s development, Vittoria concentrates on the development of a national people during the 1848 uprising in Italy and explores how cultural production influences political activity. Music, this novel implies, persuades when it expresses mid-century advances in operatic composition, where musico-dramatic elements are refreshingly realistic. Musical realism instigates a physiological reaction, suggesting a music aesthetics that anticipates by a decade Edmund Gurney’s contention that the best music is that which impacts the listener emotionally, with pleasure resulting from associations inherited from primitive ancestors.2 In Vittoria, however, scientific ideas about pleasurable sensation and volition go a step further, since this corporeal response contributes to manipulating the audience politically. This political responsiveness, along with many of the depicted compositional innovations, suggests that Vittoria loosely references Giuseppe Verdi’s mid-century operas. Verdi is not named in the novel, but then neither is Mazzini explicitly identified as “the Chief”3 – an even more obvious representation. Although some of the compositional reforms depicted in the novel might refer to mid-century Italian opera composition in general, Verdi’s operas seem intended, not least because the title of the fictional opera Camilla implies Verdi’s La Traviata (1853), based on La Dame aux Camélias (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils. As I outline below, the implicit reference to Verdi makes Meredith’s novel an early exemplar of notions that Verdian opera production and Risorgimento politics were intimately connected (politics influence opera production, opera ignites revolt), thereby contributing to recent scholarly debate over how and when this 110



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connection began. Although not the first to make this link, Vittoria effectively publicizes it to an English audience, similar to the way that Giovanni Ruffini’s novels of the 1850s informed the public about contemporary Italy, as the previous chapter suggested. Taking place about four years after Sandra Belloni, Vittoria begins with a plan to trigger an uprising when Vittoria debuts at the Milan opera house, La Scala. She is to sing an allegorical opera, Camilla, about Italy’s recent history under Hapsburg rule and the need for Italy to revive, with her final aria taking the form of an explicit battle cry. Playing various political roles, Emilia Belloni not only sings the operatic role of Camilla (“Young Italy”), but she also takes a new name in this novel, “Vittoria Campa.” When Adela and Wilfrid Pole (both allied with Austria) arrive, Vittoria unthinkingly betrays the planned revolution by warning her friends to stay away from her debut. Barto Rizzi, a fanatical patriot, discovers what has happened and seeks to undermine Vittoria and the La Scala uprising, despite “the Chief’s” desire that it proceed as planned. Factionalism results, and the first third of the novel is fueled by suspense over whether Vittoria will sing. She does, a riot occurs, and the diva narrowly escapes arrest. The plot twists through subsequent revolutionary events and the fortunes of Vittoria, Wilfrid, Merthyr, and their friends. Antonio Pericles is also present, constantly combating Vittoria’s political activities in an attempt to save her voice for music’s sake. Vittoria eventually marries another Italian loyalist, Carlo Ammiani. Despite neoGothic elements, such as attempted kidnappings and escaped convicts, there are also moments of tragic realism, as in Carlo’s death. When he passes away, Vittoria is represented as divinely rising above human emotion for, as upset as she is, she remains calm so that she will not miscarry. Because she continues to be depicted as almost analogous with Italy, the pregnancy references the promised birth of unified Italy a decade later. In Vittoria, opera and political events are mutually produced, meaning that they inspire or instigate each other. The novel thus demonstrates how quickly, and internationally, mid-century Italian opera production was perceived to influence and be influenced by social context. In “The Opera Industry,” Roger Parker argues that “political ‘events’ and operatic ‘events’ are very different, their relationship often complex and subterranean” – a notion that he had previously explored in order to debunk the traditional idea of Verdi’s 1840s operas as having particular political importance, as being the voice of the Risorgimento.4 Parker contends that between Pius IX’s reforms in 1846 and the revolutions of 1848, there were so many revolts in opera houses that Verdi’s association with insurrection



Imagining 1848 Risorgimento Opera Production


and civic unrest was not out of the ordinary; Verdi was patriotic, but his operas were not considered any more dangerous than other operas, nor did they incite revolutionary action. In reviewing those operas that were made into “patriotic musical celebrations” in 1848, Parker finds that Verdi was “nowhere near the forefront” of such occasions.5 Rather, making Verdi’s early operas synonymous with the 1840s revolutions occurred later in the century and was a result of metaphorical connections made between the operas’ stories and the Italian cause; the operas had not been originally conceived as communicating a message about the Risorgimento.6 As of 1859 and into the sixties – with Viva VERDI becoming an acronym for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia – Italian grand opera, nationalism, and Verdi became virtually identical.7 Scholarship supported the mythmaking with fabricated sources, beginning as early as the early 1880s, according to Parker.8 The result is that reception history largely continues to view middle to late 1840s Verdian operas through the lens of contemporaneous social and political events. Of course, there is no doubt that opera generally was a significant vehicle for inciting mob action against Austrian rule during the Risorgimento. The theatre was almost the only place in mid-century Italy where large gatherings were permitted, so it became a focus for political protests.9 Exponentially, the opera house became a dangerous place as the revolutions of 1848 approached, with little provocation needed to incite riots.10 Parker implies that even during the volatile early months of 1848 it was not necessarily the opera’s content that sparked mob activity. Rather, revolutionary meaning could be imposed on an opera that had no previous nationalist associations. As John Rosselli documents, a performance of Norma (1831) in 1838 honored Austrian Emperor Ferdinand, while in January and February of 1848, a theatre performing the same Bellini opera was cancelled because demonstrating Italian patriots had read political meaning into the opera.11 Operas were a particularly potent vehicle for awakening the crowd because of extreme illiteracy in nineteenth-century Italy. Harry Hearder finds that 75 percent of the population were illiterate in 1861, while Derek Beales reports that as of “1871, only 16 per cent of those aged more than six were literate in the south, only 25 per cent in the centre, and less than half in the north.”12 The result, as Beales writes, was that rather than printed texts, it was the Italian theatre and opera that spread “liberal propaganda” during the Risorgimento.13 Unlike my earlier discussion of the English concert hall and opera house as frames for looking at changes in class behavior, in Italy the musical performance itself was sometimes incendiary. The politically rousing nature was true, even



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if it is also correct that Verdi’s 1840s operas should be examined as something more than only patriotic expressions. Despite Parker’s convincing argument in terms of the so-called patriotic chorus from Nabucco (1842), “Va pensiero,” and the doubts raised by Rosselli about nineteenth-century Italian opera as “almost throughout a carrier of nationalist feeling,”14 the fact is that the nineteenth-century imagination still made straightforward links between politics and Verdian national music and this occurred in print rather earlier than 1881, when one of the first biographies containing numerous erroneous anecdotes of Verdi was published.15 As early as 1867, English readers of Vittoria were expected to interpret 1848 Italian opera politically, in terms of both libretto and music. In describing the performance of Camilla, for instance, the narrator clearly connects the operatic events and the audience’s patriotism: The famous tenore threw his whole force into that outcry of projected despair, and the house was moved by it: there were many in the house who shared his apprehension of a foul mischance. Thenceforward the opera and the Italian audience were as one. All that was uttered had a meaning, and was sympathetically translated. Camilla they perceived to be a grave burlesque with a core to it. The quick-witted Italians caught up the interpretation in a flash. “Count Orso” Austria; “Michiella” is Austria’s spirit of intrigue; “Camillo” is indolent Italy, amorous Italy, Italy aimless; “Camilla” is YOUNG ITALY! (179) The audience is poised to riot even before hearing the opera, but they do not simply read meaning into the opera. Rather, Camilla is produced specifically for patriotic purposes, as the audience quickly realizes. Even though it takes the Austrians longer to perceive the allegory, the hidden meaning is clear to them, too, within the first act. As General Pierson of the Austrian army notices, “this opera consists entirely of political allusions” (188) and he queries how it passed Austrian censorship. The opera’s meaning relies on metaphors, but only to circumvent the censors. The audience does not merely read a metaphor for Risorgimento politics into the opera; the libretto is actually composed as a direct political message, delivered allegorically, which is easily “translated” by the audience as having a single, unambiguous meaning. Making the libretto this important is a break with earlier Italian opera conventions, which had become so focused on musical elements that plot often served as little more than a vehicle for framing impassioned





song.16 In Meredith’s novel, the librettist’s political intent is made clear through observing his allegorical strategies. As the narrator reveals in an aside while describing the plot: “it is the vice of [Camillo’s] character that he cannot act in any degree subordinately [ . . . ] – (allusion to an Italian weakness for sovereignties; it passed unobserved, and Agostino chuckled bitterly over his excess of subtlety)” (190). As shown by the aside, Agostino has deliberately woven political meanings into the libretto and he regrets that the audience does not perceive them all. Opera story, purposeful patriotism, and the ability of the audience to respond all create this musical event. Working with the definitions from Chapter 2 of musical performance as event- or work-based, I suggest that Camilla is not centered on the musical work alone. Rather the event is the focus, as the musicodramatic elements converse with the contemporary political climate. It is not just the story – the opera’s allegory – that initiates an uprising, but also the music. Indeed, the emotional role of music precedes the concrete suggestions given by the allegory; before the audience will act in patriotic ways, it must be swayed emotionally. In Vittoria, compositional choices are depicted as manipulating the audience in much the same way that occurred at Sandra Belloni’s Club concert; portraying suggestibility through music relies on scientific ideas about the role of passion in initiating individual and group action. For instance, Camilla’s first aria begins as a contralto Gregorian chant as she recounts a dream about her lost mother (Italy) who fills her cup with flowing blood and tears (Italy’s rivers), which Camilla drinks. The music then rises “to a pure soprano” before the final, emotionally manipulative phrase: “And I drank,” was given on a descent of the voice: the last note was in the minor key – it held the ear as if more must follow: like a wail after a triumph of resolve. It was a masterpiece of audacious dramatic musical genius addressed with sagacious cunning and courage to the sympathizing audience present. The supposed incompleteness kept them listening; the intentness sent that last falling (as it were, broken) note travelling awakeningly through their minds. It is the effect of the minor key to stir the hearts of men with this particular suggestiveness. The house rose, Italians and Germans together. Genius, music, and enthusiasm break the line of nationalities. A rain of nosegays fell about Vittoria; evvivas, bravas, shouts – all the outcries of delirious men surrounded her. Men and women, even among the hardened chorus, shook together and sobbed. [ . . . ] Her name was sung over and over – “Vittoria! Vittoria!” as if the mouths were enamoured of it. (183–4)



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Men and women; choristers and audience; English, Italians, and Austrians come together through the influence – the semiotics – of musical sensation. Given the deliriums, the shaking and sobbing (uncontrollable emotions and reflexive bodily reactions), the scene is written in such a way as to anticipate crowd psychology. This is the potency of musical pleasure delivered by a genius (composer, singer), but it does not precipitate immediate mob reaction. Rather, it is part of the build-up, which will eventually result in the audience splitting between those addressed by Vittoria’s message to revolt (Italians) and those who are not (Austrians). This ability consciously to decide action shows that Sandra Belloni and Vittoria share similar preoccupations with the self-determinism of individuals and nations, both at home and abroad. In the second novel, the Italian people are imagined as a group of individuals who are organically evolving, rather than a collective that follows one leader. Meredith binds together various scientific understandings of the relationship between sensation and action with current political discourse, which itself was steeped in psychological and physiological ideas about the interaction between mind and body, individual and aggregate. Vittoria’s paradigm specifically contrasts passionate republicanism with sentimental monarchy – a topical issue since Walter Bagehot’s popular The English Constitution, published the same year as Vittoria, was loud in praising England’s monarchial government. Political writer and editor of The Economist from 1861 to 1877, Bagehot wrote a book-length account of British parliamentary government, emphasizing the people’s need to focus on a single monarch. As Bagehot expresses in The English Constitution, sentiment can be used as a means to govern: royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffuse feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.17 Effective organization and leadership of the masses relies not only on concentrating “diffuse feeling” on one object, but also on imagination. “It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations,” wrote Bagehot, “but it would be truer to say that they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.”18 Bagehot means that people cannot imagine past the idea of “the action of a single will, the fiat of a single mind” as the





factor that organizes the country. For a strong government, the Queen is necessary to the imagination of the people. The nation does not just structure itself; it needs a single imaginative focus. Sandra Belloni and Vittoria argue the opposite position. The former probes the problems present in a country with sentimental middle classes whose imaginations are not equal to political and economic realities, while the latter depicts Austria as weak in its Bagehot-like notions of government. For example, in Vittoria the narrator states that while Austria “conceived that [Italy] had but one man [Mazzini] and his feeble instruments, and occasional frenzies, opposed to her,” this “was ceasing to be true; though it was true that the whole popular movement flowed from that one man” (164; original emphasis). In other words, Mazzini inspires the people, but so do other patriots, such as Vittoria, Carlo and Rizzi. Like the favorite Victorian metaphor of a tangled web, the patriotic cause finds itself snarled by factionalism, as when Rizzi works against Vittoria’s performance, while Mazzini urges the diva forward. Cunning Rizzi is as passionately dedicated to the cause as is Vittoria, but individual prejudices push him to act on his own initiative, a fact that provides narrative suspense in the novel, but which also expresses the idea that Italy is a collective of people exercising free will. Italian radicals make many mistakes, but in doing so they learn – a process that the narrator directly contrasts to the disciplined collective found in the Austrian army: The army of Austria was in those days the Austrian Empire. [ . . . ] a privileged force wherein the sentiment of union was fostered till it became a nationality of the sword. Nothing more fatal can be done for a country; but for an army it is a simple measure of wisdom. Where the password is MARCH, and not DEVELOP, a body of men, to be a serviceable instrument, must consent to act as one. (70) The passage sets up a post-Enlightenment model of institutional order based on disciplined collective behavior, but it is far from flattering when organic change is sacrificed to form a “body of men” and individual identity is forsaken in favor of “the sentiment of union.” In contrast, the narrator shows mid-century Italy to be at an important developmental phase, where “pitiable” actions are “a schooling” (71). The novel thus enacts nineteenth-century scientific notions, developed by Herbert Spencer, about how people evolve by self-correcting after making mistakes. Spencer suggested that over time people will naturally evolve through experiencing the consequences of their actions, and this process builds character attributes like independence, morality and respect for



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others – qualities which were thought eventually to become inherited and to change human social conditions permanently.19 These notions fit with Spencer’s “development hypothesis,” a lynchpin idea for nineteenthcentury evolutionary theory, which argued that all development moves from simple to more complex forms.20 Meredith was aware of Spencer’s essay for it was first published in the April 1857 Westminster Review, the same issue in which Meredith began to author the Belles Lettres and Art section.21 Instead of “looking on the surface of things” at “scuffling vagabonds” (71), Vittoria cautions the reader that appearances are deceptive. The “vagabonds” are developing and the focus should be on a larger process of national development rather than the mistakes of the present. The Italian revolution will eventually succeed because development, in Spencerian terms, means an increasingly heterogeneous and individualistic society, rather than a homogeneous, sentimental focus on monarchy. Meredith’s novel makes music crucially important because it plays a role in the self-determinism of individuals and nations; music helps political direction and initiates group activism in ways that are recognizably part of Victorian mental science. For example, Vittoria’s brand of political leadership and musical aesthetics demonstrates that she understands that individuals can be semi-compelled to act in certain ways, but finally they choose their actions. As she writes to Wilfrid, inviting him to come to La Scala: “Promise me, if you hear me, that you will do exactly what I make you feel it right to do. Ah, you will not, though thousands will!” (65; original emphasis). A crowd psychologist later in the century would have emphasized the inability to choose one’s actions for oneself; an emotional response to the music would have initiated a retrograde reflexive action and the audience would have reacted through a suspension of their reasoning powers, regardless of nationality. In Vittoria, however, music is used for a specifically national purpose, to communicate a message to the Italian people resulting in their doing “exactly what I make [them] feel it right to do.” This is an instance where the semiotics of sensation and emotion lead to action, because the people half-choose and are half-compelled. I surveyed semi-willed responsiveness to Dickens’s public readings in my introduction, and in Vittoria a similar reaction occurs at the opera. The prima donna’s leadership rests on more than simply understanding that people will choose their actions; before they choose, she ignites their passions, tapping their unconscious minds through music just as she did at the Club concert in Sandra Belloni. This type of persuasion was a recognized feature in 1850s and 1860s discussions of mental physiology. Volition occurred because of sensation, according to Alexander Bain, best





known for his advances in materialist understandings of mental processes and the connection between mind and body. In The Emotions and the Will (1859), Bain explains how the mind works under emotional stimulation, which then triggers the nerves connecting the brain to the body. While much of this process is automatic, volition is brought into the equation because people will “perform such operations” which can obtain pleasure and thus avoid pain. Anticipating pleasurable and painful emotions therefore precedes volition.22 In Vittoria, music facilitates an appeal to the people precisely because it so effectively communicates passions, which are linked to specific suggestions through the allegorical opera. The singer then gives a nationalist signal and the people choose to follow. Strikingly, Vittoria understands how this sort of leadership works, premeditating her actions when she sings at the beginning of the novel to convince the brotherhood of her skill. This scene is a remarkably advanced portrayal of a woman’s public role because even Du Maurier’s Trilby, appearing almost three decades later, depicts a diva who successfully leads a crowd through song, but she is presented as mostly unconscious of her power because she is mesmerized. While Emilia practiced similar skills in Sandra Belloni, however, a different point is made in Vittoria. The audience is not only influenced by national music and suggestibility, but Italian singing style is also more powerful than German musical ideals, even to the Austrians in the audience. In Vittoria, national musical style becomes metaphoric for republicanism versus monarchism. The entire audience draws together to support the Italian prima donna over the Austrian seconda donna, despite the fact that Pericles has informed the reader that Irma di Karski “pleases German ears” (161). La Lazzeruola (crab-apple), as the Italians call Irma, does indeed sing scenes in Camilla suited to her “pure shrieks,” “shrill crescendos and octave-leaps, assisted by her peculiar attitudes of strangulation” (136, 189, 190–1). “[T]he fascination of [Vittoria’s] voice,” however, “extended even over the German division of the audience” while Irma’s “notes fell flat as bullets against a wall” (208, 198). Comparing notes to bullets suggests the idea of international battle through musical style. As a result of Vittoria’s superior artistry, the entire audience quiets when she sings: It was the highest homage to Vittoria that no longer any shouts arose: nothing but a prolonged murmur, as when one tells another a tale of deep emotion and all exclamations, all ulterior thoughts, all gathered tenderness of sensibility, are reserved for the close [ . . . ] Within her was the struggle of Italy calling to Italy: [ . . . ]. Once it completely strangled



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her notes. [ . . . ] Vittoria had too severe an artistic instinct to court reality; and as much as she could she from that moment corrected the underlinings of Agostino’s libretto. On the other hand, Irma fell into all his traps, and painted her Austrian heart with a prodigal waste of colour and frank energy [ . . . ]. Irma’s known sympathies with the Austrian uniform seasoned the ludicrousness of many of the double-edged verses which she sang or declaimed in recitative. (192–3) Despite Vittoria’s earlier training in Sandra Belloni to be true to the written score, in Italy she takes artistic license with the libretto, a liberty that is praised. National style is depicted as more important than beauty of voice; the stress is on Vittoria’s awareness that she should correct the score. In contrast, the Austro-German emphasis on fidelity to the composition determines Irma’s artistic failings, similar to the monarchial problems with Imperial government that I discussed earlier. The link that Meredith makes between international politics and national musical styles in Vittoria echoes Sandra Belloni, as does the fact that Emilia/Vittoria’s audience in each novel would probably have been largely illiterate, suggesting again the rejection of print capitalism in exchange for freedom (from the printed page, from Austrian occupation). So while it would not be unusual for an English audience to listen absorbedly to an Italian prima donna, in a novel and an opera that both emphasize the tensions in occupied Italy, it is significant that the mixed audience champions Vittoria over Irma. Italian music subdues the Austrians just as Italy will eventually prove herself the stronger force by obtaining liberty. Yet finally Italians and Germans conduct themselves along national lines; they exercise rational reflection. Despite the Austrians’ pleasure in Vittoria’s singing, the authorities still drop the curtain before she sings the last, inflammatory aria. But they do not succeed in stopping her epilogue: “The Italians present, one and all, rose up reverently and murmured the refrain” while the Austrians remain seated (208). Conscious choice is involved in the audience’s rising, just as rioting is not a spontaneous reaction to the singing, although the opera had certainly fueled emotions: Vittoria’s name was being shouted with that angry, sea-like, horrid monotony of iteration which is more suggestive of menacing impatience and the positive will of the people, than varied, sharp, imperative calls. [ . . . ] One shriek from her would bring them, like a torrent, on the boards (209–10)





Vittoria does not call, so the Italians themselves choose to break out in a “tempest,” “uproar,” “universal confusion,” and “mob” (211, 212). First, the scene demonstrates that group organization is not necessarily dependent on a single imaginative focus ( pace Bagehot), even when the singer replaces the monarch as the focus. Second, despite the resulting mayhem, there is hope of an evolving state expressed in this mob, where society is based on choosing action. Similarly, Wilfrid defies his Austrian superiors after the curtain drops by rescuing Vittoria from prosecution. Britain, too, it seems has evolutionary potential. It is the choice to respond to impassioned music and political verse that leads to positive national growth. Text and tune are persuasive because Vittoria’s performance choices and compositional instincts insist on realism that serves the dramatic situation in Camilla. The novel presents compositional features found in real nationalist operas, which work in tandem with the discourses of nineteenthcentury evolutionary biology and mental physiology. Even though Camilla is described as “a grave burlesque” (179), the nationalist associations of grand opera are still implicitly referenced. For instance, sexual and familial relations frequently stand in for nationalist expressions in grand opera, and these elements are also found in the fictional opera. As Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin articulate in The Work of Opera, because nation is fundamentally an illusion of collectivity (established through common language, parallel readerships, geography, etc.), operas use symbols that allow nation to be imagined and therefore represented in aesthetic productions. A number of sexual and familial relationships are available symbolically to communicate nation and its fate, including “fornication, adultery, and illegitimacy.”23 Likewise, Camilla is about erotic desire. The plot involves the marriage between Camillo and Camilla, and the jealousy of Count Orso’s daughter, Michiella, who is in love with Camillo. Camillo casts off Camilla in the course of the opera, planning to marry Michiella instead. Finally, Camillo realizes his enduring love for Camilla and is reunited with her. Michiella then stabs Camilla, who sings the final call-to-arms to the audience itself, breaking the imaginary fourth wall of the theatre by addressing the house and the contemporary political situation. Obviously, sexuality drives the conflict in the opera, as do extremely complex family relations since orphan Camilla has been brought up as Michiella’s sister, and Camilla trifles romantically with Count Orso, her adopted father. These relationships are allegories for the Risorgimento, as the narrator diligently informs the reader. Moreover, in Meredith’s novel, tonal structure helps to build desire, which then represents the state. In order to exemplify how this process



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occurs, I return to the passage already cited of the final phrase of Camilla’s opening aria. When Vittoria sings a phrase that lacks tonal closure, the result is a “supposed incompleteness [that] kept them listening” (183). Susan McClary describes very similar patterns in Western music from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century (including mid-nineteenthcentury opera), arguing that the taunting but withholding of tonal resolution is a means of “arousing and channeling desire.”24 To McClary, music often “[maps] patterns through the medium of sound that resemble those of sexuality.”25 These patterns appear as musical moments of instability, reaching toward resolution. Often the most enjoyable parts of an opera, being pleasurably painful in their sonic tensions, they are achieved through unconventional harmonies, erratic rhythms, chromaticism and virtuosic ornamentation that flirts with the tonal center. When the pattern of tonal expectation and release expresses erotic desire in the narrative, which is itself metaphoric for national desire, the effect potentially would be quite potent for a politically oppressed audience. Similarly, Camilla’s music is presented as slipping out of the (presumably) major key into the minor at the end, with this modulation effectively teasing the audience, who desire resolution: “ ‘And I drank,’ was given on a descent of the voice: the last note was in the minor key – it held the ear as if more must follow” (183). Meredith’s novel describes this musical manipulation as having narrative effect: not only does the unresolving vocal passage drive home a dramatic point in the opera, but it also influences the audience’s nationalism.26 The house rises to resolve the national crisis, spurned on by Camilla’s taunting: “it held the ear as if more must follow [ . . . ]. It is the effect of the minor key to stir the hearts of men with this particular suggestiveness. The house rose” (183). Camilla thus mirrors standard mid-nineteenth-century opera narratives that use musical cadential patterns as expressive of sexual build-up and release (which metaphorically signify national concerns), allowing the composer successfully to manipulate erotic narrative for political purpose. The effect is particularly beautiful and momentous because the soprano phrase that ends the aria is contrasted to the rest of the number, which is sung in a contralto monotone. On the most recognizable level, the body of the aria communicates a musical progressivism because it does not set florid, impassioned melody. Rather than emphasizing the music itself, crucial elements to the dramatic situation are unmistakably communicated through the monotone; the words’ meanings are clearer than if they were set to melody, allowing complex philosophical and political points to be made. This monotone then contrasts with the brief, striking final soprano phrase, which replaces the more traditional cadenza at the





end of the prima donna’s opening number (usually a cabaletta). The very tunefulness of the truncated cadenza emphasizes its text, “[a]nd I drank,” which is a pivotal phrase given that Vittoria is drinking mother Italy’s tears and blood. Moreover, the music accompanying these words vividly highlights the meaning: the “descent of the voice” ending in a minor key imitates the downing of the liquid (“descent”), Italy’s sorrow (minor key) and the “unresolved” political problems for occupied Italy. Camilla thus depicts actual advancements in operatic composition. Midcentury innovations in opera had to do with composing music to fit the dramatic situation, rather than simply introducing music for the sake of pleasing sound. Certainly, Camilla has decorative passages redolent of Italian tradition and is organized around set numbers. But Camilla is like Verdi’s operas of the early fifties, which simultaneously look backward at an Italian heritage and forward toward verismo.27 Of course, a number of Verdi’s contemporaries also wrote music appropriate for the dramatic situation, but I continue to refer to Verdi because it seems that overall the fictional Camilla implies a connection with Verdian opera. The quasi-realism is most striking in the use of musical motifs that serve the drama. When the veiled Camilla attends Camillo and Michiella’s pending nuptials, for instance, the narrator describes: In the midst of the chorus there is one veiled figure and one voice distinguishable. This voice outlives the rest at every strophe, and contributes to add a supplemental antiphonic phrase that recalls in turn the favourite melodies of the opera. Camillo hears it, but takes it as a delusion of impassioned memory and a mere theme for the recurring melodious utterance of his regrets. Michiella hears it. She chimes with the third notes of Camillo’s solo to inform us of her suspicions that they have a serpent among them. Leonardo hears it. The trio is formed. (200) Vittoria’s singing serves dramatic function as the melodies play upon each character’s psyche, recalling the past for Camillo and triggering Michiella’s fears. Their individual reactions to the music then initiates the trio; the formal number comes fairly plausibly out of a dramatic situation. So does the opera’s compositional cohesion, as the returning motifs are used for theatrical purpose, not solely for the sake of thematic development or pleasurable sound. Camilla therefore reflects the growing influence of symphonic thought on opera.28 Because operas written in the early 1850s began to fit music to the dramatic moment, including those by Verdi, Camilla closely references real



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Rocco’s music in the opera of Camilla had been sprung from a fresh Italian well; neither the elegiac-melodious, nor the sensuous-lyrical, nor the joyous buffo; it was severe as an old masterpiece, with veins of buoyant liveliness threading it, and with sufficient distinctness of melody to enrapture those who like to suck the sugar-plums of sound. He would indeed have favoured the public with more sweet things, but Vittoria, for whom the opera was composed, and who had been at his elbow, was young, and stern in her devotion to an ideal of classical music that should elevate and never stoop to seduce or to flatter thoughtless hearers. (197) “[S]prung from a fresh Italian well,” the need to depict a noble subject is so much the driving force of the composition that Vittoria emphasizes music that will “elevate.” Far from being a star singer who insists on music specially composed or altered to show off her voice, as often happened, Vittoria is a composer in her own right, as seen in Sandra Belloni. Here, she breaks with previous Italian operatic convention where the musical elements (“sugar-plums of sound”) outweighed consideration of the dramatic situation. As David R.B. Kimbell reminds us, earlier nineteenthcentury music, like that found in Rossini’s operas, even went so far as frequently to disregard the libretto’s meter, if not the meaning of the words.30 The practice of substituting or “borrowing” arias from other operas during the first half of the century also demonstrates the secondary importance of the narrative, not least because words were often changed in order to make the substitution fit the opera, sometimes introducing narrative gaps or changes to characterization.31 Hilary Poriss notices that even though Verdi had accepted the norm of the day up until 1847, upon reaching a certain level of popularity he issued one of the earliest warnings to those tempted to modify his operas by transposing, cutting, adding, or otherwise even slightly mutilating the orchestration.32 In short, Verdi threatened to impose a fine of 1000 francs on any theater that altered his operas in any way.33 He thus emphasized the sanctity of the operatic work to producers, which assured that the composer’s attempts at realism would exist in performance as well as on paper. Set contemporaneously with Verdi’s dictate, Vittoria’s choices as composer similarly support the realism of the musical settings and the opera’s narrative. Because she chooses not to repeat the opening aria



opera that would indeed have been new in 1848 Italy.29 The narrator alludes further to this dramatically realistic music:


despite the opportunity to do so, the drama and unbroken narrative are shown to be more important than gratifying her ego on stage, too. There are, however, moments of tension between artistic and political choices when an opera is produced for a “purpose.” Pericles represents the artist’s agony when musical autonomy is compromised, when opera is “reduced to be a mere vehicle for a fulmination of politics” (208). Given the negative portrayal of Pericles in Meredith’s two novels, little sympathy is created for this viewpoint, so introducing politics into opera is obviously not itself problematic to the narrator. But when the political allegory takes precedence over the libretto and weakens the second act, the librettist Agostino “[moans] over his artistic depravity” (190). Emphasizing political purpose over artistic merit was a pet peeve of Meredith’s, at least so far as his theory of fiction is concerned. Although I have not found documentation of the author’s political intent in writing Vittoria or the opera scenes within it, there is no doubt regarding Meredith’s theories about novels of “purpose”34 since he discussed the relation between politics and literature during his tenure as anonymous author of the Westminster Review’s Belles Lettres and Art section (April 1857 to January 1858). In the April 1857 Westminster Review, Meredith reviewed John A. Heraud’s “long modern epic,” The Judgment of the Flood: An epic poet [ . . . ] must be at once thoroughly possessed of the human heart, and entirely songful; keenly alive to the political life of his times, yet capable of the loftiest flights; it is for him to conjoin absolute matter of fact with the fiery zeal of imagination; and, while knowing nature and man as they never have been known, to shape them in unexampled song.35 Meredith’s own modern epic, Vittoria, while written in prose, nonetheless aspires to poetry and song through an innovative use of libretto, thus conjoining “the fiery zeal of imagination” with its historically accurate subject, “the political life of his times.” In the next issue of the Westminster Review, Meredith fine-tuned his opinion about the relationship between literature and politics, arguing that if novelists attempt politically to sway the public, then it needs not to be at the expense of art: It is not every knight can take the minstrel’s seat; even when this is done, the knightly aim and the bardic faculty are rarely found in harmonious union, save when fired by the immediate calls of country;



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and there is no longer a distinction between patriots. Let writers with a purpose not forget that when they make use of fiction to develop their views, these, not to appear contemptible, require the display of narrative and dramatic power; and even when possessed of such aids, they are but cunning advocates hoodwinking the jury in a larger and more licensed court.36 In this review of Sir Arthur Hallam Elton’s Below the Surface (1857), Meredith is against men of action (“knights”) using the novel to express patriotic and political ideas when they lack artistic (“bardic”) faculty, contending that successfully swaying the public requires powerful narrative. J.S. Stone plausibly suggests that the “larger and more licensed court” in the confusing last sentence refers to art.37 If we take the court to mean artistic criticism, such as Meredith is engaging in as reviewer, then, as Stone argues, the passage suggests that through art a difficult public can be convinced of the need for political or social reforms. Given the topic of Vittoria, it is significant that Meredith’s review makes the patriotic “calls of country” the most unproblematic motivation for bringing together art and politics. Meredith’s opinions about literature can be extended to a theory of opera in Vittoria, for Agostino’s realizations echo the novelist’s beliefs. Taking as its subject operatic events that are directly influenced by political events, the La Scala chapters in Vittoria comment on moments when weaving social and political purpose into art is done badly, as well as instances when it is done admirably (i.e., when beautiful music and good libretto work together to make the political message so persuasive that it is felt corporeally). Rather than being concerned with the reception history of an actual opera, Vittoria emphasizes how a “type” of opera was perceived in 1867 to function politically, even if this notion was retrospectively applied to the late forties. Camilla, besides demonstrating musical realism, is an opera of “purpose.” We see in this operatic depiction criticisms and praise for how aesthetic production and radical activism are mutually influential, and these opinions can extend back to an awareness of the novel itself. Vittoria expresses radical politics while reaching for artistic merit, and since the politically-incendiary opera chapters are among the best in the novel, Meredith’s novel of “purpose” is successful; literary worth is not secondary to the political meaning. Indeed, the radical message is potent precisely because the strength of these scenes rests on aesthetic experimentation, on wedding poetic flights of fancy with observable, “political life of [the] times.” The relation between operatic events and political activity occurs at various levels in Vittoria. Not only is suspense in the first third of the





novel built upon discovering whether Vittoria will sing Camilla, but Italian nationalist opera is literally implanted into this English novel. Short excerpts and over three continuous pages of libretto are reproduced in the novel, exponentially replacing the narrator’s blow-by-blow description of the opera plot, its allegorical meanings and the audience’s reactions. One function of reproducing the libretto is to heighten key dramatic moments, where the audience and reader are wooed into emotional sympathy with the events on stage. For example, the first libretto insertions occur when Camillo casts off Camilla. Her subsequent verse identifies her experiences as analogous to those of mother Italy. Besides the elevated effect of reading poetry in place of prose, the moment is marked as emotionally meaningful by the narrator’s subsequent description of the audience response: “It was the highest homage to Vittoria that no longer any shouts arose: nothing but a prolonged murmur, as when one tells another a tale of deep emotion” (192). Relaying how the audience interpreted these scenes, the narrator also makes obvious to the reader what the effect of the verse insertions should be: heightened feeling and sympathy. Moreover, replicating the libretto in the novel gives an immediacy to the opera’s events; without the intermediary of the narrator, the reader is placed in the position of the opera audience. Suspense is created as the reader, like the opera audience, experiences uncertainty: will the people indeed revolt? The narrator even admits that his intention is to make the reader fairly equivalent to the opera audience: I wish that I could pipe to your mind’s hearing any notion of the fine music of Rocco Ricci, and touch you to feel the revelations which were in this new voice. Rocco and Vittoria gave the verses a life that cannot belong to them now; yet, as they contain much of the vital spirit of the revolt, they may assist you to some idea of the faith animating its heads (196) This direct address to the reader occurs at the beginning of the description of the opera’s final act, which “was steeped in the sentiment of Young Italy” (196). Despite intending the reader to find a “notion” or “some idea,” obviously it is not an intellectual idea that is meant but rather “spirit.” To the narrator, the libretto comes a poor second to hearing the music, but verse is still lyrical expression and Meredith was typically Victorian in frequently calling poetry “song,” thus emphasizing the lyric connection between the arts.38 The verses, which contain “the vital spirit of the revolt,” take over the narrative entirely starting with Camilla’s reunion with Camillo and her call for the sword, approximating



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the “animating” force of lyric expression. The notion of animation is crucial, for opera causes the people to rise up, and the narrator’s desire is to communicate to the reader what inspires activism: poetry, song, and passionate aesthetic production. Gillian Beer’s comment on Meredith as “[pushing] the novel almost as far as it would go towards the compression and ellipsis of poetry”39 is especially appropriate here, for the opera scenes in Vittoria are literally compressed into verse. Raising the novel into poetic expression was a preoccupation of other nineteenth-century novelists, too, as seen in the final chapter’s discussion of Mrs Humphry Ward, and the common Victorian practices of placing poetry as chapter epigraphs, reproducing verse that fictional characters supposedly write, and inserting song lyrics into novels. Meredith is more adventurous in his experimentations in form, however, making his libretto a passionate public speech that has radical results by swaying the audience feelingly rather than intellectually. As Beer writes of Sandra Belloni, “Meredith seems to have sensed that opera, in particular, could achieve something he was seeking in his novels: a marriage between epic action and the subtle articulation of feeling.”40 In Vittoria, the wedding of epic and feeling through opera is even more obvious than in Sandra Belloni, but instead of being “subtle,” the narrator makes certain that the reader understands why libretto replaces prose: lyric signifies and conveys such affective moments that people rise together to instigate political change. This operatic narrative is then interpolated into a novel that goes on to use the same narrative strategy, for Vittoria later has to overcome her repugnance to manipulating Wilfrid’s amorous feelings. She eventually does her patriotic duty, ensnaring her old lover through a song known from Sandra Belloni, which reminds him of “moonlight between the branches of a great cedar-tree” (285). The use of song to awaken passion for political purpose is a clear case of interdisciplinary influence, as operatic conventions are echoed in the novel’s plot. Of course, flirtation can be politically motivated without necessarily referencing opera, but Vittoria’s plot is obviously juxtaposed with operatic practices. Placing Camilla so early in the novel allows it to foreshadow the ensuing plot, including other events, such as the stabbing of Vittoria. The implication is that cultural production influences life events. If we speculate on its larger effect on the public sphere, then we might wonder why this opera “type” is (re)produced within English fiction. Certainly the English operatic tradition did not have the same political function as the Italian did, so English opera could not have communicated the link between aesthetic production and radical activism. Italian





opera could do so, but what is striking is that Vittoria’s readers are told specifically what national music symbolized. While British journalists reported on Italian opera composers during the first half of the century, they did not directly connect the production of operas to political events,41 as Meredith’s novel reports happening at La Scala in 1848. I have found no earlier example in English writing of the specific Risorgimento connection to Italian opera production that Vittoria depicts, which suggests some intriguing possibilities.42 If not the first, then Meredith must have been among the earliest English writers to address the mutual influence between 1848 Italian opera production and politics, a theory supported by his making the interpretive process so easy in these opera scenes. Having the narrator tell the reader at every step how to understand the allegorical plot of Camilla is odd because Meredith usually demands that his readers take a highly active role, seen in the effort required to interpret many of his novels.43 Certainly, following the twisting plot of Vittoria requires, on the whole, energetic reading, except in select spots like the La Scala chapters. While the ease of reading and interpretation may contribute to the opera scenes being among the most engaging of the novel, Ioan Williams suggests that the five chapters set at La Scala work so well because they are one of the few places in Vittoria where Meredith has complete control of extremely complex material: These scenes reflect Vittoria’s character as patriot and cantratrice, contain incidents vital to our understanding of her later career, give a brilliant impression of the relationship between the occupation forces and the population, and at the same time contain (in the text of the opera itself) something closely approaching Meredith’s own analysis of the state of the country.44 Williams is correct, but I believe that even more than this fusion of character development and political events, the opera scenes stand out precisely because they are easily comprehended and because they conflate the aesthetic and political crowds. By “aesthetic crowd,” I intend the opera audience and the reading public; the reader is absorbed into the action in the La Scala scenes in a way that is frequently missing in the rest of the novel, thereby making the identification of the reader with the Italian patriots all the more effective. In part, the distancing in the rest of the novel results from Meredith’s altering his narrative style in Vittoria, exchanging Sandra Belloni’s Philosopher for a simple depiction of events. As Meredith admitted in an 1865 letter to Frederick Maxse: “There are scenes [in Vittoria] that will hold you; much adventure to entertain you;



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delicate bits and fiery handling. But there is no tender dissection, and the softer emotions are not kept at half gasp upon slowly-moving telescopic objects, with their hearts seen beating in their frames.”45 Without “tender dissection,” or an analysis of characters’ inner motivations, the reader is often placed at a remove from the action, watching from above. The Camilla scenes are an exception because the reader is placed in the position of an audience member motivated to act. The influence of particular political events on opera production and performance may be a fresh symbol for 1860s English readers, but the idea of Victorian fiction as politically engaged was already well established, seen most famously in Dickens’s success in influencing social and legislative change through his novels. In Vittoria, conflating the opera and reading audiences makes the political engagement of Italian opera similar to the effectiveness of reading in England. This blending of audiences from different countries reflects the fact considered in the previous chapter that English radicalism looked to Italy to focus its own activities. These opera scenes are therefore crucial for advancing the larger link between Meredith’s two novels, between English working-class concerns and Italian nationalism. Activism in England is encouraged precisely because the La Scala audience – conflated with the English reader – rises up. Vittoria suggests that radicalism in 1860s England was in an analogous position to that of 1848 Italy, which was a step toward Italian unification in the next decade. The idea of a larger, enduring process fits Meredith’s own gradualist politics. In the more literate England, however, it was reading and discussion that frequently led to protests, rather than attending operas. The implication is that English readers should move from the private realm of reading and thinking to a political activism similar to their Italian counterparts, who shifted from privately experiencing their passionate response to incendiary opera to forceful public demonstrations. While Villette and Charles Auchester explore the construction of the individual through external social pressures like the powerful gaze, Sandra Belloni and Vittoria reverse the paradigm. In Sandra Belloni, Emilia’s character is not influenced by the norms of bourgeois behavior; it is she who becomes a social benefactor by the end of the novel when she underwrites the Pole family. In Vittoria, the narrator hauls the private, silent reading process into the public arena, positioning the reader as operagoer and radical nation-builder. Thus individual and society continue to construct each other. But while in Villette it was the rational bourgeois public attempting to mold the bourgeois individual, in Meredith’s two novels it is the vagabond individual and aesthetic production constructing national identity.





“I do not know whether it is my indisposition or the orchestra that is at fault Tonight,” I said; “but everything sounds tedious and slovenly to my ears” – A violent clash of symbols interrupted me. Before I could resume, a general movement of surprise among the audience distracted my attention. Following the gaze of those about me, I looked into the parterre, and saw my acquaintance of that evening standing there on a seat, gesticulating violently. “There never was, and never shall be a cymbal in that bar” he shouted, with frantic vehemence. “I denounce you, miserable rataplaneur, to the French people. I denounce you also, unworthy chief of an unworthy band. Murderers of the beautiful, begone. Parricides – :” Here four sergents de ville seized the speaker, and hurried him away. He suffered himself to be led out without either betraying the slightest consciousness of his captors or intermitting for an instance his denunciations of the orchestra, which were audible for some moments after he had disappeared. “That is the second time this month that this has occurred,” said Madame Le Jeune. “I wonder why they admit a known madman to the theatre. The audience took his part last time, and there was quite a disturbance.” “Perhaps he was right,” I said.1 In George Bernard Shaw’s unpublished short story of 1880, “A Reminiscence of Hector Berlioz,” Berlioz’s tirade against the compositional style of the 1830s disturbs the Paris Opera. The composer’s outburst leads to police action to quiet what became a “disturbance” between musicians 130



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and audience, who perceive that “everything sounds tedious and slovenly.” Thus Berlioz literally disrupts a public sphere that Shaw depicts as boring because of academic music and the lack of good performance standards. At the same time, Shaw welcomes the composer’s loud declamations and unruly public behavior, since Berlioz promises to enliven staid polite society as well as dreary opera composition. To Shaw, the outburst is not triggered by the debate over fidelity to the score versus embellishment, but rather by the quarrel between compositional features that were also emphasized by leaders of the so-called English Musical Renaissance (EMR) and a more progressive school that sprang from Berlioz and Wagner. Even though Liszt, Wagner and Strauss are the figures usually associated with the New German School, Shaw’s fictional works make a case for including Berlioz and suggest the inspired nature of progressive composition in general. In Britain, a counter-movement to the EMR can be traced through a recurring character type that emerges in fin-de-siècle prose literature. Instead of the composer as large-scale community leader, which was a motif of fiction of the third quarter of the century and to a large extent became part of the ideology of the Musical Renaissance, the figure of a genius composer associated with the New German School and estranged from “philistine” English society is repeatedly found in fiction beginning around 1876 – first with Julius Klesmer in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, then with Edith Staines in E.F. Benson’s Dodo (1893) and also with composers in Shaw’s fictional works of the 1880s: Berlioz in “A Reminiscence of Hector Berlioz” and Owen Jack in Love among the Artists. In other words, narratives written toward the end of the century depict a transition between high Victorianism and modernism, a point that becomes obvious when we examine representations of composers and musical communities. In Chapters 5 and 6, modern refers to the period of literary modernism, which occurred mostly during the early twentieth century, although some late nineteenth-century authors begin to include elements in their writing that eventually became associated with literary modernism. The issues involved with the figure of the genius composer are made clear earlier in Shaw’s short story when Berlioz moans, Accursed be this miserable world, the paradise of pedants; the hell of genius. Let its own sordidness, like a cancer, consume it, that it may torture no more ardent hearts, and seal no more yearning lips. What tardy honour can compensate for a despised youth: what autumnal glory be to the hardened tree what one ray of light would have been



Shaw’s Fiction and the English Musical Renaissance

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The lament primarily references Berlioz’s compositional style, which prevents “pedants” from accepting him. A progressive composer, Berlioz described in his Mémoires how his musical “blasphemies” and “heretical ideas” opposed “official composers” like Cherubini.3 Matching his ardent music is his impassioned conduct at the opera and a private, but equally passionate, desire for love; the “hell of genius” refers to public insults regarding Berlioz’s compositions, but also to a private condition because he strongly feels his estrangement from human affection and the artistic world. Living outside social bonds, Berlioz exists beyond material and economic concerns, too, a state that he represents as a prerequisite for genius. “Poverty and folly walk at either side of genius, until worldliness dislodges them,” he says (7). Estranged from society, Shaw’s Berlioz is one of the earliest depictions of modern sensibility. The author repeatedly represents this modernism through progressive composers whose individualistic creativity breaks Victorian rules of order and structure, on artistic and personal levels. While students of literature generally think of Shaw as a playwright and theatre critic, musicologists emphasize his extensive music criticism, even though they know him to be a man of the stage, too. His fiction has largely been ignored by both fields, and in the few discussions of the novels, no one picks up on the fictionalization of composer C. Hubert H. Parry in Shaw’s middle work of fiction, Love among the Artists (1881). Even Michael Holroyd’s comprehensive biography of Shaw only mentions Parry in terms of Shaw’s music criticism, not in relation to the novel.4 The oversight is significant for Shaw devoted much of his creative energy to revealing the potential for an exciting regeneration in English music. His hopeful prognosis relied on the music world advancing through the groundbreaking work of genius composers with affinity for the New German School. Not only were the compositions meant to be pioneering, but their originality also depended on the composer’s alienated stance; no longer would the composer dedicate himself to aiding social evolution through music-making, a view emphasized by devotees of the English Musical Renaissance. Shaw’s portrayal is especially fascinating not only because of his shrewd awareness of the musical world, but also because his fiction constructs the qualities of British compositional progress quite differently from how it actually developed, while still correctly identifying Parry as the leader of the movement.



to the bud of spring? Oh for a smile, a kind word, a glimpse of a beautiful face, that I might no longer desire to die. Alas, I may more reasonably hope for another insult.2


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The third of Shaw’s five novels, Love among the Artists, was written between 19 May 1881 and 10 January 1882, published serially in Our Corner between November 1887 and December 1888, and appeared in book form in 1900 in America and 1914 in Britain.5 It therefore reflects the world of 1880 and 1881, even though it only reached the public in later years. While his literary career had a slow start, Shaw had been communicating with the public through journalism from 1876, acting as music critic for The Hornet when he spent a year ghost-writing for the singing teacher George J. Vandeleur Lee, and more famously writing as “Corno di Bassetto” for The Star (1888–1890) and “G.B.S.” for The World (1890–1894).6 While Shaw’s witticisms span the London concert and opera scene, there is an obvious gap during the important year of 1880, during which the Musical Renaissance is often perceived to begin.7 Love among the Artists conveys opinions present throughout Shaw’s music journalism, but even more important, it shows Shaw’s awareness of the events that were thought to mark the beginning of the English Musical Renaissance. The scant criticism that has been written on this novel focuses on what the work expresses about artistic genius, but it does not contextualize its observations in terms of the emerging Musical Renaissance.8 Moreover, given that he only encountered Karl Marx’s writings in 1882,9 the novel is fascinating for revealing Shaw’s nascent socialism and how these ideas interact with a social role for music that differs from the EMR’s belief that music should assist ethical evolution. These preoccupations were ongoing concerns for Shaw, having been explored in his second novel, The Irrational Knot (1880). As William Irvine recognizes, this earlier work demonstrates suspicions about “the social utility of elegant idleness”10 by opposing the frank Edward Conolly, inventor of the electro-motor, with the affectations of high society. Significantly, the difference in class culture is first established through music. In the opening scene, the upper-middle classes believe they are bringing culture to the masses through a “Music for the People” concert, which fictionalizes elements of the People’s Entertainment Society. As Paula Gillett documents, this society, functioning in the early eighties, held goals in common with the rational recreation movement, which promoted leisure activities for temperance purposes and to quiet political activism. Ironically, however, the patronizing attitudes of the upper classes could contribute to social unrest, as shown by a riot that erupted during a performance of the People’s Entertainment Society in 1881, probably because the urban poor objected to upper-class preaching.11



Love among the Artists


Rather than siding with the so-called philanthropy of the societies’ affluent organizers and performers, Shaw’s novel suggests their misplaced prejudices because Conolly, raised in an opera family, outshines them in skill and taste. The concert scene reveals the true cultural level of the upper-middle classes when Marian Lind does not know the key she sings in and lacks a well-developed vocal range. As the narrator relates, “Conolly sat down, knowing now that Miss Lind was a commonplace amateur. He had been contrasting her with his sister, greatly to the disparagement of his home life; and he was disappointed to find the lady break down where the actress would have succeeded so well.”12 Similarly, Marian is surprised to find Conolly an “accomplished singer” (13). Conolly summarizes the novel’s lessons toward the end of the book – how the fine arts are used to sham superiority: Before I ever saw a West End Londoner I knew beautiful from ugly, rare from common, in music, speech, costume, and gesture; for in my father’s operatic and theatrical companies there did come now and then, among the crowd of third-raters, a dancer, an actor, a scenepainter, a singer, or a bandsmen or conductor who was a fine artist. Consequently, I was not to be taken in [ . . . ] by made-up faces, trashy pictures, drawling and lounging and strutting and tailoring, drawingroom singing and drawing-room dancing, any more than by bad ventilation and unwholesome hours and food [ . . . ]. I found that the moment I refused to accept the habits of the rich as standards of refinement and propriety, the whole illusion of their superiority vanished at once. (270–1) Comparing West End beliefs about art to labor reform (ventilation, hours, food) not only unveils the illusory nature of cultural elitism, but also suggests the need for reformation in affluent quarters. These topics are developed in Shaw’s next novel, but instead of having a rational workman highlight bourgeois deficiencies, Love among the Artists contrasts instinctive genius with the privileged classes. In this later novel, the social elite are dedicated to art, but practice it like diligent craftsmen – an approach that is contrasted to passionate creativity that fits no scholarly rules, as seen in the first instance by the plot synopsis. Fitting for a novel that questions notions of art and its relationship to a capitalist public, Love among the Artists opens at the Albert Memorial (completed 1876), where Mary Sutherland, her father, her fiancé Adrian Herbert, and provincial tourists contemplate the lavish memorial,



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demonstrating different levels of awareness about what the monument signifies. The public are drawn to its colossal grandeur, but understand the shrine through guide books and materialism instead of as a work of art.13 Thus from the beginning, the novel presents monumental British art as important to mass culture, but the people do not truly understand it. Investigating these issues, the plot turns around artistic characters, such as the impoverished Welsh composer, Owen Jack, who tutors Charlie Sutherland. Jack’s rudeness, his aggressive pounding on the Sutherlands’ piano when he composes, and his invitation to a drunken soldier to come home and play the clarinet part of his fantasia, however, lead to his dismissal by Charlie’s sister, Mary. The general upper-crust perception of the composer’s behavior is that “[n]ature does not seem to have formed Mr Jack for the pursuit of a fine art,”14 but appearances can be deceptive for Jack is a true genius, with a personality and reception history modeled compositely on Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and Parry. As early as 1892, Shaw identified Jack as “partly founded on Beethoven,”15 probably because of general nineteenth-century perceptions of the stroppy, illogical Beethoven as epitomizing the genius composer.16 Parallels with Berlioz can be sustained through the similarities between Love among the Artists and the unpublished short story, “A Reminiscence of Hector Berlioz.”17 Jack’s compositional style and reception are similar to Wagner’s, and I develop the associations with Parry later in this chapter. Ironically, even though he eventually becomes famous, it is not because the English musical establishment recognizes Jack’s talents. Rather, his initial success results from the networking undertaken by the Sutherlands’ acquaintances. Jack’s fantasia for piano and orchestra is subsequently programmed by the (fictional) Antient Orpheus Society, who engage a renowned Polish pianist, Aurélie Szczympliça, to play it. This event occurs in 1880, since the chapter that announces Jack’s commission identifies the year as commencing with events that happened in the first year of the new decade: a General Election and “a change in the Ministry” (126). Jack rises to fame, despite the public’s continued ignorance about his music, as when they commission him to write a second piece for the Antient Orpheus and then find his choral work puzzling. Eventually, the composer proposes to Mary and is refused – a response that “saves” Jack for musical pursuits. His character fades in the narrative when Mary marries a businessman. Meanwhile, the untalented painter Adrian Herbert makes a disastrous alliance with the capricious, career-minded Aurélie, who continues to perform after marriage and motherhood. The novel thus





implies that geniuses should not form love relationships, at least not in capitalist societies. In commenting on the audiences, compositional style and performance practices of 1880, Love among the Artists demonstrates that the features of the so-called university school were in place this early. Therefore, progressive music is defined by what it is not: it displays different (better) values from the high Victorian ideals that fed the emerging EMR. One of the central tenets for English Musical Renaissance composers were Ruskinian beliefs in the social task of art, whereby composers were morally responsible for ennobling, improving, and evolving the character and ethics of the English people. As Michael Allis observes, Parry’s writings often express ideas of the moral responsibility of musical geniuses,18 such as when Parry wrote about Beethoven in his first book, Studies of Great Composers (1887): One of the most interesting things about the history of music is the way in which it invariably illustrates in some way or other the state of society, and the condition of thought of the people among whom it is produced. [ . . . ] when some exceptionally splendid genius appears, who is fully in sympathy with the best tendencies of his day, and capable of realising in thought the conditions and feelings which men are most prone to in their best and truest moments, he becomes as it were a prophet, and raises those who understand him above themselves, and ennobles and purifies at least some of those traits and sympathies which combine to make the so-called spiritual element in man; and so comes to be a leader, instead of a mere illustrator, of contemporary emotion. A little thought ought to show that this connection between music and the average mental and even moral state of society is inevitable. Appreciative audiences are as necessary to music as composers and performers19 In this passage, Parry builds on Spencerian notions of how music helps society to evolve, making the composer into a cultural custodian and cultivator, an enhancer of mind and morals. Of course, music and morality were commonly linked in Victorian England, as the introduction to the current study shows, but Parry’s notions of compositional structure as assisting ethical development included an evolutionary bias. The composer’s ideas about music are thus similar to Victorian commonplaces about reading, whereby high art should be encouraged in order to help the physiological and psychological development of the race.



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The identification of the national music project with the social purpose of music can be seen in Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling’s suggestion of 1840 as the start date for the English Musical Renaissance in order to link it with the mass-music movement.20 Certainly the dates encompassed in the present volume agree with Hughes and Stradling, but this chapter focuses on what changed in 1880 specifically. In the present study, “EMR” refers to the changes beginning in 1880, which is the more usual starting date given to the English Musical Renaissance.21 For those who date the EMR from 1880, Parry’s cantata Scenes from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is the founding event, followed by the emergence of a specifically national school of composition including composers such as C. Hubert H. Parry (Professor at Oxford and Director of Royal College of Music), Charles Villiers Stanford (Professor at RCM and Professor at Cambridge), and Alexander Campbell Mackenzie (Principal of the Royal Academy of Music).22 The academic affiliations of these composers made them an easy target for their critics, who despaired of their traditional schooling and seemingly barren intellectualism. While grand opera or the use of folk rhythms and melodies is most commonly thought of as music nationalism in the late nineteenth century, Chapter 3 proves that national music was also given a geographic configuration, whereby an anthropological understanding of the origins of language and music linked passionate communication with climate and emerging social fabrics. The EMR naturally grew out of these notions, concerned as it was not only with the development and progress of specifically English music, but also with social and racial improvement. The process was two-prong, for as structurally-careful compositions reached audiences, the people were simultaneously schooled in score-study in order to appreciate and promote more pieces of this sort. Additionally, the EMR insisted that once sound no longer swept the audience, there was room for intellectual pursuits in music that would help the race evolve. As part of this musico-social link, nineteenth-century Musical Renaissance composers were most often associated with the classicism of Johannes Brahms instead of the progressivism of Richard Wagner, with the styles of the two composers perceived to be incompatible, even though in practice this was not always so.23 Instead of music raising the cultural awareness of the people, in Shaw’s third novel compositions and performance quality are degraded when oriented toward Philistine audiences. The bourgeoisie and aristocracy are represented as misplaced cultural guardians, and, reciprocally, the English musical world is figured as pedantic, dull and excessively restrained; professional musicians are represented as behaviorally similar to the




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“It is magnificent,” she replied. “So refined, so quiet, so convenable! It is like the English gentleman. Manlius smirked. Jack, who had reappeared on the outskirts of the group with his hat on [ . . . ] added: “A Lithuanian or Hungarian orchestra could not play like that, eh?” “No, truly,” said the Polish lady, with a little shrug. “I do not think they could.” “You flatter us,” said Manlius, bowing. Jack began to laugh. (140) Jack laughs because he had just responded to a similar query by expressing his dissatisfaction with the orchestra: “They are over civilized. They are as much afraid of showing their individuality as if they were common gentlemen” (138). Their playing style reveals that genteel behavior is problematic and, ironically, “common” in its rule-bound homogeneity. Refinement and quiet control demonstrate a lack-luster understanding of music, an alarming drag on English musical progress, and a public sphere made up of discipline and reason instead of organic development and passion. The “refinement” of these musicians and musical aficionados is confirmed by the musical prototype that they follow: disciplined score analysis. Structural analysis was taught through educational initiatives in program notes earlier in the century, as I outlined in the introduction, and these notes were the norm at London concerts by the eighties. In Shaw’s novel, Mr Phipson, a member of the Antient Orpheus Society, is representative of the musical elite because he “always read the analytical programs carefully” (206) and thus understands music through anecdotal tales and compositional rules.24 Indeed, orchestral musicians and musical aficionados alike bury their heads in the score rather than simply listening. As the progressive composer Owen Jack says to one of the members of the elite music society where his fantasia has just been rehearsed: Look at those friends of your shaking their heads over my score there. They have heard my music; but they do not know what to say until they see it. [ . . . ] They are showing one another why it ought not to have been written – hunting out my consecutive fifths and sevenths, and my false relations – looking for my first subject, my second subject, my working out, and the rest of the childishness that could be taught to a poodle. (137–8; original emphasis)



aristocracy. As Aurélie responds to the conductor of the Antient Orpheus when he asks how she finds the orchestra:

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These rule-bound academes are contrasted to the ranting passion of truly great musicians. The problems of educational institutions were to preoccupy Shaw well into the twentieth century, as when he declared in the preface to London Music in 1888–89 (1935) that “learning lessons out of schoolbooks and receiving marks at examinations” left the students as “pious barbarians.”25 His earlier pronouncements on the subject are just as cutting, as we can see in Love among the Artists. The novel not only criticizes this academic approach to music, but also characterizes it as near extinction by referencing earlier London musical societies that did indeed dissolve. “[E]stablished nearly a century ago” (126), the Antient Orpheus Society is similar in age to the Concerts of Ancient Music (est. 1776), but even more the Antient Orpheus seems to allude to the Musical Union, a chamber music society running from 1845 to 1881 with a musically and socially elite audience.26 Although they performed different repertoire, all three establishments have in common an aristocratic patronage that took seriously their guardianship of music in England, and they all declined in decades of social unrest: subscriptions to the Concerts of Ancient Music began waning in the turbulent 1830s27 and, coinciding with resuming social upheaval, the Musical Union stopped performing after the 1881 season. Besides the fact that Shaw was writing his novel as the Musical Union collapsed, this particular society is referenced because the founder of the Musical Union, John Ella, was associated with the type of bookish music, analytic program notes, and programming choices that Shaw criticizes. Additionally, Ella was nicknamed “Professor,” insisted on silence when music was playing, and venerated Beethoven.28 Love among the Artists picks up on these elements when it refers to “[t]he gentleman addressed as Professor” who, after protesting against Jack and progressive music, “turned away [ . . . ] and gave all his attention ostentatiously to Coriolan” (139). Even though the Musical Union’s demise probably mostly occurred because it could not survive without the autocratic Ella who retired in 1880, Shaw’s novel makes a good case for unstable economic and social conditions being contributing factors to its downfall and to the establishment of institutional support for exciting new music. In her informative essay on “John Ella and the Making of the Musical Union,” Christina Bashford argues that there were financial worries plaguing many London musical societies in the 1870s because of such factors as rising musicians’ salaries, a larger number of concerts for audiences to choose from, and aging and dying subscribers.29 Beyond the discrepancies between expenditures and profit within a single society, however, Love among the Artists suggests the connection between social and musical climate as





also influential, for the Antient Orpheus responds to “a sudden access of spirit in political agitation, commercial enterprise, public amusements, and private expenditure” (126) with fearful premonitions about their future as audiences dwindle. As a result the committee “became as eager to fill the concert programmes with new works as their predecessors had been determined to exclude them” (126). Criticizing the artistic savvy of the musical establishment, Shaw’s novel presents the Antient Orpheus as having no true understanding of the needs of British music, only making changes based on market considerations and the “warnings of the press” (126). Indeed, the role of market and media cannot be underestimated: not only were conservative presses like the Musical Times helping to establish reform in concert etiquette and paving the way for the EMR,30 but the novel represents the press (including Shaw as music critic) as forcing beneficial change: the result is that the Antient Orpheus commissions a true rebel (Owen Jack) even though elite musical societies lack appreciation for progressive British Music. Shaw thus identified what looked like a Renaissance in British music, and seems to have tried to decipher why new works were being programmed; in Love among the Artists, music societies, rather than making purely artistic choices, reacted to the distressing social situation that began in the late seventies, which included economic depression, loss of religious faith, political uncertainties, working-class demonstrations, and a sense of cultural decline.31 More specifically, Shaw may have been responding to new repertoire choices made in the Musical Union’s final season. I propose the last connection because the Musical Union’s change in programming philosophy occurred more or less simultaneously with Shaw beginning to write Love among the Artists. Almost the only contemporary British composition featured in Musical Union history was Parry’s Cello Sonata in A major, programmed and performed by Ella’s successor, cellist Jules Bernard Lasserre, with Wagnerite Edward Dannreuther at the piano.32 Significantly, Lasserre’s performance on 10 May 1881 occurred nine days before Shaw began Love among the Artists. Commenting on the direction in which the Musical Union seemed to be moving, the novel thus expresses hope in a fresh musical voice (Parry), while also suggesting that the musical society has no inherent understanding of the needs of British music.33 Although it comments on social influences, however, the novel places even more emphasis on the general progress of British music at the time. It does so by blending elements of several real music societies to form the fictional Antient Orpheus. It would be remiss not to acknowledge that the amalgamation includes the Philharmonic Society, which, like the Musical Union, was in existence when Shaw began his novel. In



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terms of the structure of the committee and repertoire, the Antient Orpheus is closest to the Philharmonic Society, which was run by a committee of musicians and composers, and programmed orchestral repertoire that included British commissions, all of which the novel echoes.34 The Antient Orpheus, however, does not simply fictionalize the Philharmonic Society; in fact, it does not exactly replicate any existing society. Rather, Shaw’s novel knowledgably comments on the general atmosphere of London music societies, characterizing the composite as academic, narrowminded and market-driven. But the narrative also depicts the opposing force through another composite: Owen Jack’s attributes combine those of several composers who were recognized for their progressiveness, individuality and genius. Therefore, rather than suggesting a single composer as the hope for the future, the fusion indicates the general characteristics needed to move British music forward, in Shaw’s opinion. Simultaneous with these composite pictures of composers and music societies, the novel references specific details; it anticipates a new phase in British music with precisely the event that would retrospectively be said to start the Musical Renaissance. Eight months after Parry’s Scenes from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound premiered at the Gloucester Festival on 7 September 1880,35 Shaw sat down to write Love among the Artists, in which Owen Jack composes a Prometheus Unbound for his second Antient Orpheus Society commission. While Parry may have seemed simply a plausible prototype for Jack given the link between the Antient Orpheus’s and Musical Union’s sudden programming of a living British composer, there is little doubt that Jack’s Prometheus Unbound references Parry’s. The allusion to Parry is particularly interesting for two reasons. First, Shaw has not been known to comment this early on Prometheus Unbound. The Gloucester premier was followed by a second performance in Cambridge on 17 May 1881, and scholars have not thought Shaw to be present at either of them. Only in 1885 at the London premier and in 1893 did he directly refer to the piece in his music criticism.36 Given that the successful Cambridge performance occurred on 17 May and Shaw started Love among the Artists on 19 May, however, there is good reason to suppose that he either attended the Cambridge performance or read reviews and examined the piano-vocal score published by Novello in 1880.37 Indeed, if he had also heard the Parry Cello Sonata on 10 May, Shaw may have simply become interested in Parry and sought out his work. Regardless, Love among the Artists comments in “progressive” ways on the seminal event for the burgeoning Musical Renaissance. Second, Shaw expressed a plain-spoken, although not thorough, dislike of Parry in his later criticism, probably because Parry was subsequently





heralded as the leader of the EMR: “it must be remembered that I am violently prejudiced against the professorial school of which Dr Parry is a distinguished member.”38 The Jack/Parry connection in Shaw’s novel makes sense, however, because Parry’s early compositional style oscillated between Brahmsian and Wagnerian paradigms. As Meirion Hughes documents, Parry’s first major work, his overture Guillem de Cabestanh (1879), demonstrated predominantly Wagnerian influence, the next Brahmsian (Piano Concerto in F sharp), and then Wagnerian (Prometheus Unbound). Jeremy Dibble identifies sections of the last that recall Liszt, Brahms, Handel and Mendelssohn, too, but the Wagnerian dimension is undoubtedly the most prominent.39 Given the Jack/Parry link in the novel, it seems that Shaw saw the early Parry as a promising anti-establishment figure. However, since the composer was probably dismayed by the initial bad press reviews of his Prometheus Unbound, Parry subsequently turned to a more Brahmsian, classicist approach to composition in 1882, developing the hallmark style of the EMR that Shaw disliked.40 Besides the similar titles and the closeness in dates between Parry’s Prometheus Unbound and Shaw’s novel, Jack’s piece points to Parry’s cantata because of similarities in compositional style. To be sure, there are differences in overall structure,41 but like Parry’s piece, Jack’s is progressive, technically difficult and, to the score-studying musical establishment, strangely structured. Manlius, the conductor, experiences the half-hour symphony/overture as having “only glimpses of form in the midst of chaos” (207). Indeed, the maestro is nervous and does not understand the work, nor do the performers feel comfortable with it at the premier. This response is quite similar to the chorus’ puzzlement at rehearsals for the Gloucester Festival.42 Nor do the public understand Jack’s piece, for the audience greets the overture with “silence for some moments, then faint applause, then sounds of disapproval, then sufficient applause to overpower these, and finally a buzz of conversation” (243–4). Yet Jack’s genius is confirmed by the index of Aurélie’s responses: she is “excited and almost in tears,” thinks the music “superb! Splendid!” and full of melody, deems the English public “unworthy” in their “icy stupidity,” and lays the blame at the feet of commerce, which “renders the people quite anti-artistic” (245, 244, 247). From the description of Jack’s Prometheus, the public still expects set numbers and would prefer to hear Mendelssohn; they do not hear the continuous, through-composed melody that Aurélie perceives, which is demonstrated by Herbert’s hope that they will “hear some melody in the next part, by way of variety” and her retort: “It is a work full of melody” (245).



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Wagner was anticipated in the year 1819 by a young country gentleman from Sussex named Shelley, in a work of extraordinary artistic power and splendor. Prometheus Unbound [sic] is an English attempt at a Ring, [ . . . ]. Both works set forth the same conflict between humanity and its gods and governments, issuing in the redemption of man from their tyranny by the growth of his will into perfect strength and self-confidence44 Shaw’s description of Shelley’s verse could be retrospectively applied to Jack’s characterization: the conflict between Jack and the bourgeoisie parallels Prometheus and the ruling government (Jupiter), or perhaps even Siegfried and Wotan, Alberic and Loki from The Ring, if we follow Shaw’s socialist reading of Wagner’s tetralogy in The Perfect Wagnerite.45 The progressive musical style associated with Bayreuth makes it an obvious means of championing the new, especially a style which broke with the “rules” of set numbers in order to achieve greater natural and dramatic expression. Wagner’s revolutionary activity in 1849 Dresden was also likely to have made an impression on the young Shaw, which we can see later in The Perfect Wagnerite.46 Through his fiction Shaw thus signals the importance of Wagnerian music set to a revolutionary poem and makes Prometheus Unbound and Parry/Jack anti-establishment champions. Indeed, Phipson enthuses, if Jack has done justice to Shelley’s setting, “the work will be the crowning musical achievement of this century. I have no doubt whatever that he has succeeded; for he says himself that his music is the complement of the poetry, and fully worthy of it” (205). Giving music the function of “complementing” the poetry could itself be read as Wagnerian, given Wagner’s stress on libretto and music as equally important. Once Phipson hears Jack’s music, however, the university-schooled Antient Orphean changes his opinion. Phipson is an index for the importance of the Promethean subject and also the conflicts regarding the musical setting. Shaw was right: Parry’s piece is indeed a pivot point in English musical history, and yet what the Wagnerian music heralded is different from what history has since mythologized. Parry’s Prometheus Unbound may have become the legendary starting point of the EMR, but the music itself is not often revived. Hughes and Stradling suggest that



The compositional style of Jack’s Prometheus might reference any progressive composer of the day, but years later in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) Shaw connects the dots between the radical, Romantic poem and “the revolutionary Wagner.”43


Shelley’s dangerous poem with its revolutionary associations was reason enough for pinning Parry’s cantata to the movement of rebirth, associating the start of the musical movement with a political gesture.47 The reception of Shelley’s poetry in the early eighties is more complicated, however, dividing between responses to Shelley’s reformist politics on the one hand, and the poet’s unquestionable lyricism on the other hand.48 While Shaw found Shelley an inspiration politically, but questioned his poetic merit in those instances when artistry obscured the message,49 Matthew Arnold rudely assessed the Romantic poet as a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”50 Arnold’s comment, made in 1881, emphasizes the exquisite images and musicality of Shelley’s verse, while questioning whether he ever “lay hold upon the poet’s right subject-matter” – perhaps precisely because he emphasized “charm of soul and spirit”51 instead of a larger view of life.52 The bifurcation of response to Shelley is important, as I return to below, but so is the fact that Shelley, whose verse hardly reached his contemporary public, was being debated during the time when Parry composed his cantata and Shaw wrote his novel. In fact, not only was Shelley attracting attention in the early eighties, but his Prometheus Unbound received special notice in the Athenæum’s September, October, and November issues of 1881 when poet James Thomson turned his critical eye to the poem’s structure and the poet’s musicality.53 Certainly, William Michael Rossetti’s three-volume edition in 1878 of Shelley’s collected poetry, along with a range of Shelley scholarship presented in the notes, also made an impact.54 Regardless of how Shelley’s radical leanings were ignored or emphasized by different readers, it makes sense that a setting of a well-known English poem marked the commencement of a specifically English school of composition. Shaw certainly emphasized the inherent nationalism of the piece when he referred to the 1885 London performance of Parry’s Prometheus Unbound as “a setting of one of the greatest poems in the English language by an English composer, performed for the first time in London.”55 Thus Shaw commented on the actual musical achievement, despite giving the verse to a Welsh composer in his fictional version, thereby suggesting a British Musical Renaissance. Given recent scholarly interest regarding whether the Renaissance was English or British, Shaw’s novel opens up questions about whether this major music critic envisioned national musical progress as ideally fusing English and Celtic elements, and whether this hope was different from the subsequent direction of music composition.56



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Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, moreover, contained seeds that could be interpreted in different ways, potentially allowing both the progressive and national schools to claim the same poem as their standard. In other words, beyond the two responses to the poet, there are two ways to read this poem. Besides Prometheus being a paradigmatic figure of British Romantic literature because he challenges the establishment,57 Prometheus Unbound contains an idea of the social role of the artist that was integral to Parry and the Musical Renaissance. Shelley’s preface to Prometheus Unbound presents the idea of reciprocity between artist and society: “Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians, are in one sense the creators and in another the creations of their age.”58 Parry would go on to promote this idea, while Jack does not; it is Parry who becomes the essence of “Englishness,”59 while Jack is “no gentleman,” as publishers complained when rejecting Shaw’s manuscript.60 The fundamental differences between how Jack is represented and who Parry would become may be explained by the fact that Shaw found the progressive musical style of Parry’s Prometheus Unbound to be important, combined with his interpretation of the poem as a significant statement of radical politics. Despite Shaw’s dislike of traditionally-schooled and university-styled composers, it probably seemed in 1881 that Parry would develop along very different lines than he ultimately did. Shaw’s subsequent aversion to Parry may even have been particularly strong because of disappointment – because Parry did not turn out as Shaw had hoped and, indeed, depicted in Love among the Artists.61 But setting a revolutionary poem such as Prometheus Unbound probably meant something quite different to Parry. In his excellent book-length study of Parry’s life and works, Jeremy Dibble suggests that Parry was attracted by the “radical ideology” of an epic work, which provided a vehicle for dramatic, Wagnerian vocal music, as seen by discussions with his teacher, Wagner advocate Dannreuther.62 The Romantic notion of the artist as not only observing the world, but also creating it through imaginative processes, became part of perceptions of what “Englishness” meant to university-school composers, but this view was no longer radical by the eighties. The establishment took it up, to the extent where revolutionary discourse was used for patriotic ends.63 In contrast, Shaw’s novel suggests that true revolutionary action means being progressive for the sake of music itself, without regard to the public. Music by geniuses does not serve mainstream ideas and tastes, although it can be in vogue, as seen in Wagner’s late-Victorian reception when his music was considered fashionable even by those who disliked it. Similarly,




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“What are they playing?” said Mary with affected indifference. “The Kreutzer Sonata.” “Oh! I am so glad.” “Are you, indeed? What a thing it is to be fond of music!” (143) Mary does not know Beethoven’s violin sonata to hear it, although she understands its name value. Similarly, society “affects” knowledge of Jack’s music after his fantasia launches him to fame. At a party given by Phipson, Jack plays the piano upon request and “[t]hose who affected Jack-worship h’shed at the talkers, and assumed an expression of enthusiastic expectation” (175). The “enthusiastic expectation” occurs through knowledge of Jack’s social cachet. By this time, Jack’s compositions are played throughout Europe and made into popular arrangements for theater music, despite the fact that auditors respond by saying “[i]t certainly sounds exceedingly ugly” (183) even with adulterated harmonies. In short, “Jack-worship” does not necessarily mean liking the music’s tonal structure. Shavian satire is bitingly evident, since the public fête a composer simply because an elite musical society has endorsed him, and even the Antient Orpheans dislike Jack’s music. In Love among the Artists it is precisely the desire for order that leads university-school musicians to denigrate Jack’s music and offensive character, but the narrator bitingly suggests that it is fashion and market value that lead to Jack-worship. In other words, Shaw depicts the tensions of modernism, where the ego is in conflict with material bonds and society. He may be famous, but Owen Jack – individualistic in appearance, behavior, and creative genius – pays a price when placed in a society that misunderstands him and to which he resists assimilation. Blatantly disregarding rules of social behavior, Jack cannot form successful romantic attachments or maintain employment. His music also expresses his rudeness, a fact criticized by an Antient Orphean: “A man who degrades music to be the vehicle of his own coarse humor, and shews by his methods of doing it an ignorant contempt for those laws by which the great composers established order in the chaos of sounds, is not likely to display a courteous disposition and refined nature in the ordinary business of life” (139). While misunderstanding Jack’s compositional excellence, the Antient Orphean is ironically correct that Jack’s music reflects his character – a familiar enough assumption in Victorian England. But it is



in Love among the Artists, the public purports to be “fond of music,” but they are not musically knowledgeable, as Mary demonstrates at the Antient Orpheus Society’s annual Harley Street Soirée:

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the very presence of Jack’s distinctive personality that makes his music “genius” and modern, and this conflicts variously with social values (e.g., common courtesy) and the market (e.g., the capriciousness of the public in determining market value). The progressive conductor/composer is a modern individual, expressing his own subjective reality through art in a revised Romanticism, but he also participates in budding ideas about Liberal Individualism. As Stefan Collini argues in Liberalism and Sociology, the term Individualism acquired political meaning between 1880 and 1914. Instead of broadly denoting a self-centered mode of being as it had for much of the nineteenth century, the capitalized word expressed limited state intervention beginning in the 1880s.64 Political theory is not my focus here, but it is important that Liberal thinkers began to want the individual to be the exclusive basis of social identity. Collini’s book is particularly significant for deconstructing the misleading perception that certain huge turn-of-the-century ideas are necessarily mutually exclusive, such as Liberalism and Sociology, or Individualism and Collectivism (including Socialism). Non-fiction prose literature of the day provides evidence that these seeming dialectics were sometimes perceived as dependent upon each other, as when Oscar Wilde opined in “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) that “Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.”65 Wilde means that without property as a designation of social position and citizenship, a person will be able to exist as himself: “With the abolition of private property . . . Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”66 Merging aesthetics with the strictly political realm, Wilde then goes on to argue that “Art is the most intense mode of Individualism” and may even be the “only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.”67 As such, it becomes a powerful force as it disturbs the “monotony of type” and “slavery of custom”68 through novel style and subject matter, which results from artists who are completely themselves. Shaw thus penned his novel at the start of a period of intense debates regarding the role of the individual, state intervention, marriage, property, and the “social” realm. He not only explores all of these elements in fictional form, but also introduces the topics of art and creative genius, thus anticipating the growing emphasis on unique, subjective experiences that develops in Aestheticism. I suggest that the characterization of the composer/conductor in Love among the Artists uniquely figures 1880s tensions between high Victorianism and modernity by taking a recognizable Victorian type (the conflation of conductor/composer with social leader)





and refiguring it to pose questions about individuality placed in front of a functioning collective, as seen when Jack takes the podium at the rehearsal of his fantasia for piano and orchestra. Because the orchestra members share modes of behavior with the ruling classes, the depiction of rehearsal techniques also widens into a more general investigation of the interaction between individuals and institutionalized group policy, as well as considering artistic expression. Of course, the scene’s focus on improving performance practice is unsurprising to readers of Shavian music criticism, for Shaw’s Hornet articles in the seventies despair of badly executed performances, where instruments make noise rather than play with good tone and phrasing, singers lack abandon, conductors cannot manage large ensembles and, reciprocally, orchestras do not follow the maestro.69 Yet Shaw’s journalism and fiction also criticize the disciplined rehearsal and performance practices of English orchestras. This censure differentiates the novel from earlier Victorian fiction, like Charles Auchester, where the central focus of the new baton conductor improved performance practice, and from actual mid-century innovations that similarly raised performance standards. Conductor Michael Costa, for instance, was responsible for significant changes in orchestra discipline and management from 1830 to 1882, including conducting with a baton, changing the orchestra layout to the modern design, stopping the deputy system (player substitutions), and restructuring rehearsals from social opportunities to serious work.70 English orchestras may have subsequently functioned as well-oiled machines, but Shaw thought that even these new practices did not go far enough toward improving British music-making, and in 1877 he criticized Costa’s mode of leadership: By dint of constantly beating time, Sir Michael has secured the foremost place in the very thin ranks of our conductors. [ . . . ] he is the only chief under whose bâton orchestras display good training. The merits which he successfully cultivates are precision and refinement, and both go so far in music that their attainment alone would entitle him to his high position. Nevertheless, they are not everything. [ . . . ] That highest faculty of a conductor, which consists in the establishment of a magnetic influence under which an orchestra becomes as amenable to the bâton as a pianoforte to the fingers, we do not give Sir Michael Costa credit for. Instead, he has the common power of making himself obeyed, and is rather the autocrat than the artist.71 “[G]ood training” may secure good performances of some repertoire, but not all, as Shaw writes in the remainder of the article. He is ultimately



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concerned with artistry, or with “magnet[ism]” that lies outside of autocratic leadership, mechanical time-beating and the “common power” of being obeyed. These worries are also addressed in Love among the Artists, where refined discipline and homogeneity result in weak, “common” (138) performances, while Jack’s lack of self-control and ranting disregard of rules takes art to new levels. In opposition to Manlius, who, “when conducting, never allowed his orchestra to forget the restraint due to the presence of ladies and gentlemen in the sofa stalls” (131), Jack roars at the rehearsal: “Louder. Less noise and more tone. Out with it like fifty million devils” (135). The resulting sound earns genuine congratulation by many of the Antient Orpheans, even if they cannot understand the score through analysis. Before Jack mounts the podium, the orchestra exemplifies a well-managed collective, which is criticized as culturally dry, similar to Vittoria’s suggestion that the Austrian army, in swearing to become one body, is too stiff for evolution. In Love among the Artists, it is genteel conformity that threatens English art, if not English society. Shaw’s novel is so far removed from most nineteenth-century depictions of managed collectives that leadership is divided during the rehearsal. Of course, in a concerto the conductor’s controlling influence is automatically different from how it would be in a symphony. Nonetheless, the central gaze as the model of power is replaced by sound in this instance. For example, when Jack and Aurélie wrestle over the tempo, Manlius takes the podium for some of the fantasia. However, Manlius was not the man to impose his own ideas of a composition on a refractory artist; and though he was privately disposed to agree with Jack that the Polish lady was misjudging the speed of the movement, he obediently followed her playing with his beat. But he soon lost his first impression, and began to be affected by a dread lest any one should make a noise in the room. He moved his stick as quietly as possible, and raised his left hand as if to still the band, who were, however, either watching the pianist intently or playing without a trace of the expert offhandedness which they had affected at first. The pleasure of listening made Manlius forget to follow the score. (134–5) Afterwards, Jack takes Aurélie by the hand and makes the following remark: “I did not know what there was in my own music, and would have spoiled it if you had not prevented me” (136). Soloist and composer literally share leadership roles in place of the ineffectual baton. This directorship differs sharply from the fictionalization of Mendelssohn in Charles





Auchester, whose baton conducting proved an effective, magnetic mode of group organization. In Shaw’s novel, sound (double direction) replaces the gaze as the basis of leadership. Overcoming a disciplined collective also occurs through compositional sound. When Aurélie’s dainty section ceases, Jack resumes the podium and the music juxtaposes a hodge-podge of themes, where each one remains distinct rather than developed: The pianist looked bewildered, like the band, most of whom lost their places after the first fifty bars; but when the turn of each player came, he found the conductor glaring at him, and was swept into his part without clearly knowing how. It was an insensate orgie [sic] of sound. Gay melodies, daintily given out by the pianoforte, or by the string instruments, were derisively brayed out immediately afterwards by cornets, harmonized in thirds with the most ingenious vulgarity. Cadenzas, agilely executed by the Polish lady, were uncouthly imitated by the double basses. Themes constructed like ballads with choruses were introduced instead of orthodox “subjects.” (136) Strangely and humorously, the solo piano’s agile cadenzas are echoed in the double basses and themes are “constructed like ballads with choruses.” The compositional style emphasizes heterogeneity and individualism; instead of developing a first and second subject, there is a cacophony of multiple themes with unorthodox harmony, juxtaposed genres, and unusual orchestration. Fantasias – the Nicht-Form, as German musicologist Hugo Riemann termed them in 188972 – do indeed tend to be rather loose in structure and instrumentation, and can combine with the concerto. Shaw’s choice of form to express the idea of an individual voice, outside of English society, follows on from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, in which Klesmer’s fantasia, Freudvoll, Leidvoll, Gedankenvoll, comments on “melodic ideas not too grossly evident”73 which most of the English gentry cannot understand. In Shaw’s novel, however, impetuous, passionate music is not only the work of genius, but it also overpowers rational, refined systems of artistic and social behavior. The result? The orchestra forgets their “expert offhandedness” (135). Jack’s characterization therefore demonstrates the tensions between Victorian discipline and modern individuality, suggesting that the individual’s subjective reality is more powerful than the ordered social group. Even if reluctantly, the orchestra performs this reality in the concert hall, making aesthetics again a shaping influence in the public sphere, similar to my discussion in the introduction. The public realm now reverberates tensely with the sound of



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individuality; the general public dislikes this radical music, but artistry resolutely moves in this direction. Consequently, the genius is ostracized even as he is fêted. At the beginning of this chapter, my reading of Shaw’s unpublished short story, “A Reminiscence of Hector Berlioz,” suggested that Shaw was preoccupied in the early eighties with the theme of the alienated genius. In many ways, Owen Jack’s character resembles the Berlioz that Shaw fictionalized in 1880. Indeed, Berlioz might have been a particularly apt prototype for artistic estrangement at this time. While better received abroad than in his native France, Berlioz was still envisioned as an estranged figure in British concert repertoire until the twentieth century, although Leanne Langley has proven the inaccuracy of this myth. In actuality, his Faust, Hungarian March, and Overtures to Roman Carnival and Benvenuto Cellini helped to stretch nineteenth-century repertoire.74 Still, in Victorian Britain, Berlioz never reached Wagner’s popularity or cultural influence, making him an appropriate model for “the hell of genius.” Similarly, despite his success, Jack does not seem to have any lasting effect on the musical establishment and society, nor is his personal life improved. Like Berlioz’s passionate declamations against “pedants,” Jack rants against the injustices of the university school, ridiculing their style in his own performance at the Harley Street soirée: [Maclagan] had composed a symphony – his second – that year for the Antient Orpheus: a laborious, conscientious, arid symphony, full of unconscious pickings and stealings from Mendelssohn, his favorite master, scrupulously worked up into the strictest academic form. It was a theme from this symphony which Jack now sounded on the pianoforte with one finger. [ . . . ] Jack then began improvising on the theme with a capriciousness of which the humor was lost on the majority of the guests. He treated it with an eccentricity which burlesqued his own style, and then with a pedantry which burlesqued that of the composer. At last, abandoning this ironical vein when it had culminated in an atrociously knockkneed fugato, he exercised his musical fancy in earnest, and succeeded so well that Maclagan felt tempted to rewrite the middle section of the movement from which the subject was taken. (144–5; original emphasis) Playing Maclagan’s theme in front of the elderly gentleman exhibits an appalling lack of etiquette, and yet Jack makes his point; he demonstrates greater musical aptitude than compositions true to “academic





form,” and he does so through improvisation – a spontaneous playing that directly opposes the “laborious” music scored on paper.75 Yet the ridicule seems embittered; there is a desperate need to prove himself and his genius in public. Given the distressing disappointments in human interaction experienced by Shaw’s musical geniuses, Jack and Berlioz do not rest easy with their role as outcast. They criticize high society, but also engage in loud, attention-seeking display. The composers are isolated not because they eschew human society, but rather because of the effects of Philistine society, which is bitingly criticized and bitterly regretted. Its hide-bound music becomes a statement about upper-crust culture, not only because the affluent find academic music a reflection of their own strict structures and decorums, but also because of the ruling class’s capitalist underpinnings. Yet true art, the novel suggests, should not be tied to materialism. As Jack bemoans the exploitative music business – he earns a pittance while his fantasia is “pirated and played in every musical capital in Europe” (198) – he simultaneously turns down lucrative income from teaching, favoring time to compose instead. His music rises above material considerations, yet he needs money if he is to marry (Mary). Jack’s satiric response to Mary’s query as to whether he really cares about money is, “Ha! ha! No, of course not. Music is its own reward. Composers are not human; they can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartette for a family” (198). Jack craves love, despite the fact that Aurélie’s dire domestic situation seems to warn geniuses to remain in their lonely garrets. Finally, similar to Shaw’s Berlioz, Jack resolutely chooses poverty and genius rather than become indebted to capitalism. After Mary has refused his proposal, the composer wanders to Kensington Gardens and watches the setting sun: “I hanker for a wife!” he said, as he stood bolt upright, with his knuckles resting lightly on the parapet, and the ruddy gold of the sun full in his eyes. “I grovel after money! What dog’s appetites have this worldly crew infected me with! No matter: I am free: I am myself again. Back to thy holy garret, oh my soul!” (203; original emphasis) The sun sets on his “worldly” desires and Jack’s tranquility returns. Bourgeois values are what Shaw takes umbrage with: materialism, discipline, and music when it simply buttresses the trappings of gentility. Shaw’s geniuses serve art for its own sake, but their characterizations are complicated by a yearning for love and for public approval of their compositions.



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Assuredly, Love among the Artists is fiction, but it was written during a decade identified by Shaw as crucial to his training as music critic. In his essay, “How to become a Musical Critic” (1894), Shaw defines the years between 1877 and 1887 as the period in which he actually became a critic, by which he meant that, even more than being musically knowledgeable or literarily inclined, the critic must stand “in the presence of the whole world and its art.”76 During this decade Shaw was helped by “my economical studies and my political practice, which gave me an invaluable comprehension of the commercial conditions to which art is subject.” A music critic must know the material world within which music exists if he is to “agitate for musical reforms,”77 and Shaw’s fictional works of 1880 and 1881 pessimistically portray musical progress as tied to considerations of cost. Shaw’s third novel is a literary undertaking, but it is also a rationalcritical expression regarding the need for musical reform. Indeed, its greatest value may be precisely the latter. The plot has engaging moments, but Shaw unquestionably had more literary talent as a playwright. More striking is the author’s perspicuity in identifying Parry/Jack’s Prometheus Unbound as revolutionary and how, more than a psychologically nuanced study, Jack is a type, reconfigured from Victorian to modern. He exists beyond social context, precisely because he is proudly ethical; his morals are oriented toward serving the highest art, despite pecuniary hardship and Victorian ethical and behavioral systems. Configuring Jack’s music as outside society is different from the Aesthetic tenet of l’art pour l’art, however, because its function is ultimately social criticism; this musical style may be represented in Love among the Artists as existing for its own sake, but the novel then uses it to censure current society and the musical world. Although Jack’s music is as progressive as Wagner’s, the narrative carefully differentiates Jack from the Aesthetic school. As the narrator explains of Lady Geraldine Porter: No man who wore a velveteen jacket and long hair had a chance of an introduction to or an invitation from Lady Geraldine. These people, she said, can behave themselves properly if they like. We have to learn manners before we go into society: let them do the same, since they are so clever. As to Jack, he was her pet aversion. Society, in her opinion, had one clear duty to Jack – to boycott him until he conformed to its reasonable usages. (174; original emphasis) The Aesthetes are set up on the opposite side of the social paradigm from mannered society, as is Jack, but Jack is clearly not an Aesthete. He





eschews velveteen, although when he anticipates meeting Mary at the theatre, he sports a “black silk kerchief, which he persisted in wearing instead of a necktie,” securing it “with a white pin” (183). Jack, however, is depicted as only even vaguely dandyish at the point when he begins to take his popularity seriously, suggesting the consumerism inherent in Aestheticism and Wagnerism.78 Otherwise, Jack exhibits a rugged originality that pits him against the musical mainstream and high society. Lady Geraldine also admits Jack’s individual stance when she responds to an encounter with him, “[i]s this the newest species of artistic affectation, pray? It used to be priggishness, or loutishness, or exquisite sensibility. But now it seems to be outspoken common sense; and instead of being a relief, it is the most insufferable affectation of all” (179). Jack seems a “monster,” “savage,” and “enfant terrible” (182, 193; original emphasis) precisely because he exists outside recognizable schools of behavior. In this portrayal, Jack is an interesting contrast for ideas about Wagner that were forming at the end of the century. The eighties were transitional in this respect, for Jack’s characterization differs dramatically from Wagnerism in 1890s fiction and poetry. As Emma Sutton has shown, Decadence and Wagnerism were not “simply synonymous” but they “became closely affiliated during the 1890s,”79 being mutually constitutive movements, if complexly so. Speaking broadly, Aestheticism identifies art as non-utilitarian, autonomous, and outside social progress – in short, l’art pour l’art (in theory, if not in practice).80 Decadence went further, expressing lurid and perverse experiences, favoring artifice and the bizarre, and including Wagnerism as a recurring motif and inspiration for literary innovations.81 Wagnerians generally identified Wagnerism with dangerous emotionalism at the time, whether they were members of the general public or the music profession. They espoused ideas of natural musicianship and passion, and it was precisely the element of retrograde emotion that anti-Wagnerites criticized. To them, the sensuality and savageness of Wagner’s music promoted a similarly primitive social state in listeners, which was deeply worrying. For instance, Hugh Montgomery, a friend of Parry’s, wrote to him: [there is] that quality in your work which makes Wagner so unsatisfactory to me and immoral in the effect he produces on my emotional condition. A tendency to promiscuous intercourse with all sorts of loose keys [ . . . ] and in Wagner I undoubtedly find too much excitement of a disorderly kind82



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Erotic love, or “promiscuous intercourse,” was exactly the feared reaction. “Excessive” sexuality was so much identified with Wagner that, as Sutton has skillfully shown, it signified this quality to fin-de-siècle sexologists and within the various erotic poetics, fiction, drama and drawings by such figures as Aubrey Beardsley, John Davidson, Michael Field, John Gray, Vernon Lee, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde.83 In contrast, Jack’s music is portrayed as having neither moral nor sensual social effects. Speaking extremely broadly, Jack is a composite of several progressive composers as I have shown, while in the nineties it is specifically Wagner-ism (not necessarily Wagner) that is a signifier within Decadence and Aestheticism. In the latter, individuality also becomes a created aesthetic “role,” seen most famously in Wilde’s life.84 As Shaw configures it, then, in the early eighties the national music project is not truly a Renaissance so much as a continuation of values already in place in the Victorian musical world. Given these ongoing elements, Shaw’s third novel essentially puts forward a case for dating the so-called English Musical Renaissance from 1840. More, his novel emphasizes some of the problems potentially experienced by modern individuals caught within or reacting against this dominant musicosocial movement. Because the narrative emphasizes the stultifying effect of this situation, it can be seen to suggest the need for new directions in British music and its relationship to London society. As the next chapter explains, other fictions of the 1880s, such as Robert Elsmere, considered the direction of English society more broadly.





As high Victorianism faded and literary modernism began to take shape, fiction writers continued to envision public musical performance as an essential ingredient for a forward-moving society, but authors began to shift their emphasis away from group formation to individual response. I do not mean to suggest that fin-de-siècle prose works narrowly present a single interpretation of musical scenes – they certainly propose an array of opinions about music-making that often grow out of earlier ideals – but whether focusing on the disciplined solo performer, the enlightened modern composer, the perceptive listener, or the would-be person of culture, each narrative demonstrates the potential for racial advancement through musically astute characters who are more aware of universal truths than is philistine society at large. Ideas of the artist as social leader were also present in the earliest years of Victoria’s reign, but in previous works of fiction it was a functioning musico-political mass that represented national progress. In contrast, the literary prose works discussed in this chapter, published from 1888 to 1910, connect together through the leading idea that outstanding people of musical culture will influence England’s future through self-development rather than political activity. My discussion includes three popular novels, one each from the late eighties, mid nineties, and early twentieth century, and a collection of dialogic essays from 1894. Of these, I give Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) the most attention for several reasons. First, it presents a contrast to Shaw’s Love among the Artists and therefore reveals some of the complexities of the transitional eighties. Of course, Robert Elsmere could not have responded directly to Love among the Artists since Ward finished her manuscript before Shaw’s novel was serialized in Our Corner (1887–1888),1 which makes the two narratives even more interesting as separate comments on the period. While Shaw criticized Victorian 156



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institutional practices as stultifying to the individual and society at large, Ward yearns for a modernism influenced by Victorian ideals. Robert Elsmere interacts with contemporaneous theological and musical debates, and it also considers the import of music’s role in Victorian literary history. Ward’s narrative thus makes obvious how some distinctive threads of the present subject are perceived to tie together in literature produced in the last quarter of the century. Because Ward is aware of connections among Villette, Charles Auchester and Sandra Bellini, she emphasizes the general role of music in creating feeling discourse, rather than the differentiations that I have previously made between musical styles, the idea of collective as ordered or violent, and working-class versus bourgeois sympathies. Yet while Robert Elsmere helps to initiate concluding thoughts about a literary tradition that depicts musical audiences and ensembles, it does not portray a truly public performance, although Robert Elsmere’s sisterin-law, violinist Rose Leyburn, is said to play a concert. Perhaps if Rose had only a small role in the novel, such an aside would be excusable. The violinist’s vibrant, headstrong character and her impassioned musicmaking, however, comprise a strong subplot. She is pictured playing for a large private concert and smaller audiences, even if we never see her concertize on stage. The novel thus demonstrates a fresh way of applying ideas about public performance and audiences; it allows us to examine how notions discussed thus far play out in the shady realm of so-called private concerts. Indeed, the discourses involved are so close to what I have discussed in earlier chapters, that it is possible that Ward’s conservative views regarding women made her stop short at depicting unambiguously public performance, despite the fact that Rose does concertize. Regardless, the novel initiates investigations regarding how the present topic opens out into other themes. Because it recollects and refigures Matthew Arnold’s ideas about English culture as mixing Hellenic and Hebraic qualities, Robert Elsmere also introduces a more general consideration of the role of Culture during high Victorianism. Making German instrumental music the epitome of Hellenic and Hebraic fusion, the novel conflates disparate German compositional schools into a single expression of Teutonic music, as rendered by Rose Leyburn, an English violinist. Ward thus follows racial ideas prevalent in mid-Victorian England about the Aryan connection between German and English (not British) people, and this ethnology underlies her notions of national spirit or identity, including its cultural production. As I will show, the novel proposes that playing and listening to German music will help England to achieve a positive future state because of desirable national characteristics perceived to exist within Teutonic cultural



From Collective Action to Creative Individuality


production. The violinist’s character, moreover, depicts two ideas about the relationship between individuality and social cohesion: Hellenic/Hebraic culture is expressed by geniuses to advance human society, but the genius must then act responsibly rather than capriciously. As the nineteenth century waned, Ward’s voice is only one of many that contribute to how the public role of culture was imagined. As the classes sit side by side in box and pit, E.F. Benson’s Dodo (1893) and E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) illustrate the interaction between people from different backgrounds. These later novels also consider the role of individual responsiveness to be more important than communal listening. In Benson’s novel, for instance, I propose that the modern genius composer continues his/her late Victorian figuration as a guiding force for the upper echelons, but a single individual glimpses the composer’s message rather than an entire community. Taking a slightly different slant, Vernon Lee’s set of essays in the form of fictional dialogues, Althea (1894), goes so far as to suggest that hearing certain musical styles aids individual and national evolution. In Althea, in other words, the listener’s perception of music has greater value than the composer’s originality, with the caveat that modern and ancient music elicit different visceral responses. Further complicating the picture, the selected works of fiction also demonstrate that people continue to attend concerts to socialize and listen, but conflict is fueled when middle-class characters meet low wage earners who have not experienced the privilege of “culture.” In Howards End, problems arise through a disastrous cross-class relationship, initiated while at a cheap concert for the people – a genre of concert begun alongside other Victorian philanthropic movements to help smooth class conflict. Speaking broadly, as high Victorianism fades and twentiethcentury social forces emerge, public music-making is still envisioned as inspiring ideal social evolution, while there was in actuality a tense confrontation between class-based differences in behavior, education, and ways of imagining public identity. There are thus competing ideas found in turn-of-the-century narratives regarding whether racial evolution will most result from the genius composer’s musical expression or an audience member’s perspicuity, what type of repertoire is ethically best, and whether listeners should respond critically or subjectively, with the music inspiring personal associations. Put another way, ideas about culture, society and identity originating in Victorian fiction persist in novels through the early twentieth century, but these motifs are reconfigured when high Victorianism meets avantgarde forces. Instead of defining self within a functioning group, literary



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Modern German music in Robert Elsmere and Matthew Arnold’s influence Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, arguably the most popular novel of the late eighties,2 is like Shaw’s Love among the Artists in condemning the affectations of high society, but it does so through the double lens of religion and music. As he begins to set up a “reorganised Christendom [ . . . ] for browbeaten man,”3 vicar Robert Elsmere learns of the artifice and moral dangers of cultivated London society, as does his wife Catherine’s sister, violinist Rose Leyburn. Like Robert, Rose eventually learns to hear “the piercing under-voices of things – the moral message of the world” (490). While criticizing modern society, however, the novel also sets forth the potentials of the modern spirit, and Robert and Rose communicate the qualities of this condition through their respective pulpit and stage performances. Shaw and Ward further come together by investigating and refiguring the Victorian themes of, respectively, the composer and German music’s relationship to public order, but while Shaw suggests the social estrangement of truly creative people, Ward follows Victorian ideas of a spiritually nurturing public sphere within which individuals find sustenance. Rose’s performance of German music plays a special role in Robert Elsmere by communicating the ideal attributes of that future English culture to her audiences. In Ward’s novel, Rose plays works by Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Louis Spohr, and Anton Rubinstein, and this composite German music is associated with a modernism that touches the masses, similar to Robert’s preaching. In the nineteenth century, performers were normally associated with specific music, rather than different compositional schools. Because she was a student of Brahms’s friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, Rose should play Brahms and eschew Wagner, especially given Joachim’s antipathies toward the latter.4 Yet despite the different schools of composition (Brahmsian classicism versus Wagnerian progressivism), it is possible that Ward depicts how German music overlapped in practice. Certainly, Arnold Schoenberg retrospectively suggested that although Wagner was associated with progressiveness, perhaps Brahms could be, too.5 Even the compositional



prose shows that individuals exist outside of natal class, whether that person assists social advancement through musical perspicuity or whether he or she sits painfully on the margins of culture, schooled in music’s ideal role in raising humanity, but unable to realize the dream due to alltoo-real class barriers.


styles of English Musical Renaissance composers sometimes recalled Wagner and Brahms within the same piece. In line with these amalgams, Rose plays “some Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms” (239), suggesting that the Hungarian influence on Brahms may have led to an idea of ethnic savageness that could be seen as common ground with the perceptions of Wagner’s music (documented in Chapter 5) as dangerously primitive. Certainly, this “savage” music would fit Rose’s wild character. Yet it remains true that the more usual Victorian perception would have been of compositional difference between Brahms and Wagner. Along this line of reasoning, Rose’s cantabile passage from “one of Spohr’s Andantes” (5) would not similarly suggest savageness. Thus there seems to be contradictory notions of what German music expresses in the novel. In gathering all German repertoire under one umbrella, Ward does not display Shaw’s musical acuity, but it is not because she was musically uninformed: according to her daughter, Ward played J.S. Bach, Beethoven and Brahms throughout her life.6 I suggest that Robert Elsmere therefore exhibits an idea of modernity in music that binds together English and German culture, as Shaw’s novel did, but for a different purpose. Rather than being oriented toward musical reform, the narrator groups together “Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein” as “passionate voices of the subtlest moderns, through which the heart of our own day has expressed itself even more freely and exactly than through the voice of literature” (176–7). These composers all express modernity to the narrator, and the factor equating them is nationality, not musical style. Ward’s novel thus introduces an ethnology to musical behavior and repertoire that illustrates what Matthew Arnold found to be “the modern spirit,” or “a sense of native diversity” between Indo-European and Semitic cultures.7 Before returning to a consideration of Rose’s individuality, I want to tease out the implications of Arnold’s formulation of culture and how it connects to music, because Arnold and Ward find individuality and national development to be closely interactive. It is clear that a racial schemata infused Arnold’s ideas about cultural history and its evolution.8 In Culture and Anarchy (1869), for instance, ethnology plainly influences Arnold’s opposition between the two great influences on Western culture, which he famously terms Hellenism and Hebraism. As Stefan Collini concisely defines, Hebraism fixes above all on the idea of duty, of moral rules, of the subjugation of the self [ . . . ]. Hellenism, by contrast, concerns itself more with knowledge and beauty, with the play of ideas and the charm of form.



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Hebraism attacks wrongdoing, moral laxness, and weakness of will; Hellenism attacks ignorance, ugliness, and rigidity of mind.9

Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism.10 Referencing the “genius and history” of races is important, for Arnold viewed his role of literary critic as assisting specific sciences like philology and physiology in order to discover kinship networks; forms of language expose keys to peoples, just as literature manifests spiritual similarities between cultures.11 Therefore, the ethnology of the period inflected Arnold’s ideas of culture, which included notions of the world being broken into three racial families (based on the skin pigmentations of white, yellow, black), and also subdivisions within European people. Stephen Prickett has identified that Arnold’s ideals were influenced by Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–1855), which differentiated between northern European Aryans and Mediterranean peoples (Italy, France, Spain, Portugal), to the advantage of the former.12 Even before writing Culture and Anarchy, Arnold had begun comparing national characters, including subdivisions within the European family and differentiations between their distinctive artistic expressions. Published as the essays On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866), Arnold examined “literature, genius, and spiritual production”13 in order to challenge received opinions that the English nature was Saxon and perhaps Norman, suggesting that Celtic interbreeding and cultural contact also infused English language, blood, spirit and literature. The essays are important, being Arnold’s first approach to the subject of the English people as being “made up of a dialectic of races” that express Hebraic and Hellenic principles, as Robert J.C. Young writes in Colonial Desire,14 but they are also unusual for articulating ideas about music. Despite Arnold’s reputation for prioritizing literature and philosophy over visual art and music when discussing “culture,”15 in the Study of Celtic Literature Arnold clearly views music on par with literature in



Significantly, Arnold expresses the differences in racial terms:

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All that emotion alone can do in music the Celt has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs; but with all this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt, so eager for emotion that he has not patience for science, effected in music, to be compared with what the less emotional German, steadily developing his musical feeling with the science of a Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven, has effected?16 Science, in this case, means “patient fidelity to Nature,” “freedom from whim, flightiness, perverseness,”17 or systematic order, and probably reveals a general sense that Bach and Beethoven obey compositional rules handed down (Hebraism) in addition to heaven-bestowed emotional sensibilities. In mid-nineteenth-century England, after all, invoking Beethoven would indicate impassioned musical genius. These racially based pronouncements on music have parallels in Robert Elsmere. Ward’s intellectual pedigree was proudly Arnoldian (Matthew Arnold was her uncle), and it is a commonplace that she explored Matthew Arnold’s ideas in her fiction. In Robert Elsmere, it is plainly evident that Catherine Elsmere (née Leyburn) typifies puritanical Hebraism, while Rose Leyburn characterizes Hellenic beauty. More complexly, however, Rose plays German music, which Arnold defined as disciplined but “feeling,” and this music epitomizes evolutionary progress (modernity) precisely because it brings together Hebraist and Hellenic forces; it contributes discipline and steady order to emotion and the inexpressible. Indeed, Ward differs from Arnold in representing music as better than literature in communicating “the modern spirit.” Yet Ward’s presentation of German music as a “modern” voice, expressive of a hopeful movement toward a Renaissance of Hellenism, stands in agreement with Arnold’s historiography of English culture18 and can explain why Rose’s repertoire includes German composers of differing compositional schools while excluding British, French and Italian repertoire. In her approach to German music, Ward may also be following another famous Arnold, her grandfather Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, whose celebration of Saxon influences in English culture demonstrated almost unadulterated “Teutomania,”19 unlike Matthew Arnold’s argument that the English inherited a mixture of Saxon, Norman and Celtic elements.



communicating national spirit – perhaps fitting given the essays’ discussion of Welsh Eisteddfods and bardic verse. In the fourth section of the Study of Celtic Literature, Arnold contrasts German and Celtic spirit, designating music and poetry more spiritual than the representational “plastic arts”:

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Concentrating on German influences on the English bourgeois musical scene, Ward’s novel includes critiques and transformations of earlier Victorian fictional motifs (German composition and performance practices as mutually constructive with socio-political systems of group management) by adding a more pronounced racial template to the discussion of German music. She also communicates awareness of music’s aesthetic usefulness within prose writing, situating Robert Elsmere within a heritage of other Victorian fiction dealing with music. When Rose wants to read, she searches for Charles Auchester – “that queer musical novel” (183), as Robert’s old Oxford tutor and Rose’s first love interest, Edward Langham, terms it – a novel about German music and another passionate violinist. When it cannot be found, she becomes engrossed in Villette instead, seemingly because it was written after Brontë’s return from abroad, as Rose herself has just come back from the continent (185). Another, more revealing relationship between the three novels exists, however. Charles Auchester and Villette emphasize the importance of the aesthetic within a rational bourgeois society – a balance that Ward is also attentive to. In her introduction to the Haworth edition of Villette, Ward contrasts “self-control” to emotional effusions when discussing Brontë. It is Villette’s rational Dr John who in her view is “the least tangible, the least alive,”20 as well as the most Hebraic and Puritan. Ward herself makes the Arnoldian link in her introduction to Villette, admitting that it is the Hebraic element within the English people that makes it difficult for all but a few British authors (Brontë in Villette, Meredith in Sandra Belloni and Richard Feverel [1859], Henry James in Roderick Hudson [1875] ) to be “poets of passion, [ . . . ] that is, of exalted and transfiguring feeling.”21 Fittingly, her illustration of this Hellenic “poetic vision” and “romance”22 is the outdoor concert scene in Villette, which I discussed in Chapter 1. Thus Ward demonstrates her awareness of the musical link between Charles Auchester, Villette, Sandra Belloni and Robert Elsmere, which not only have musical plots, but also use music for aesthetic purpose – to emphasize imaginative, emotional expression within prose writing. This idea descends from Aristotle’s awareness that lyric expression was useful in rhetorical debate because it moved audiences emotionally, aligning Ward with Arnold’s notable preference for Greek culture.23 Hellenism, in Culture and Anarchy, is equated with Jonathan Swift’s coinage, “sweetness and light”: The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with this central and happy idea of the essential




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Ward goes one step further in making culture “of like spirit with poetry”: she awards to music in fiction the ability to move prose toward poetry, the literature of a Hebraic nation into Hellenic expression. Similarly, the musical element of Robert Elsmere moves the novel from a heavy rational debate toward aesthetic production. Most critics of the day responded to the primary story of Robert Elsmere and the theological questions raised by the novel, considering Rose and Langham’s love story gratuitous at best. Even the Reverend H.R. Haweis, violinist, music critic, Wagnerite and author of the popular Music and Morals (1871), avoids any mention of the subplot in his forward to the 1891 edition of Robert Elsmere.25 Modern critics, however, occasionally respond positively to Rose and Langham. Donald David Stone finds these two the only memorable characters in a book that otherwise simply creates spokespeople for conflicting Victorian ideologies, and Vineta Colby suggests that the subplot introduces needed suspense, since Robert marries Catherine too early in the novel for the main story to be a traditional marriage plot.26 Rose and Langham’s romance certainly adds narrative interest, but perhaps more significantly, Rose’s musical passion also serves a crucial aesthetic purpose. Ward recognized the problems inherent in writing rational-critical fiction “without overstepping the bounds of poetry or fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and so losing the ‘simple, sensuous, passionate’ element which is their true life.”27 Although Ward specifically refers here to the problems inherent in a plot where rational, intellectual growth initiates an emotional crisis (between Robert and Catherine), she later identifies in her autobiography that it was precisely the problem of bringing emotional expression into an intellectual narrative that made writing the novel so arduous.28 Henry James may have criticized Rose’s “impertinence,” desiring her to be as deeply serious in music as Catherine is in religion,29 but Rose’s fiery performances significantly contribute to the narrative’s achievement as a literary endeavor instead of a mostly dry theological debate. Rose’s personality – wild, flippant, obstinate – is also part of what draws her to the music she plays; this music indicates progress, which is depicted as “conquering” and “banishing” traditional (Hebraic) elements in English culture. The music is first identified as modern when it is figured as overpowering geography associated with the English past.



character of human perfection [ . . . ]. In thus making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection, culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry.24


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In a stranger coming upon the house for the first time, on this particular evening, the sense of a changing social order and a vanishing past produced by the slight but significant modifications it had undergone, would have been greatly quickened by certain sounds which were streaming out on to the evening air from one of the divisions of that long one-storied addition to the main dwelling we have already described. Some indefatigable musician inside was practising the violin with surprising energy and vigour, and within the little garden the distant murmur of the river and the gentle breathing of the west wind round the fell were entirely conquered and banished by these triumphant shakes and turns, or by the flourishes and the broad cantabile passages of one of Spohr’s Andantes. (5) William Peterson sees the allusions to Wordsworth in the first section of the novel as accentuating Westmoreland’s connections to an earlier age, as they similarly functioned in Arnold’s poetry.30 In the above passage, however, sound transforms and conquers in a manner quite different from how it resonates long after sight in Romantic poetry. John Hollander establishes how “in Romanticism’s concern with the visual and the visionary, a new attitude toward the realms of sense develops, and we observe, for example, the frequent event of the eye giving way to the ear at a particular kind of heightened moment.”31 In Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” (1807), for example, the speaker carries the highland lass’s song with him as he wanders on and the poem ends, suggesting a rural music that lingers past the scene and the margins of print: Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; [...] I listen’d till I had my fill: And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.32 The song literally seems to “have no ending” as it remains in the speaker’s heart while he strides away, past the moment when he visually observes the singer. Lasting even into the future, “Long after it was heard no more,”



Robert Elsmere opens with a description of the Leyburns’ house in a Westmoreland valley:


music transcends the scene, eventually being memorialized on the printed page. In Ward’s novel, however, it is not natural sound nor laborer’s song that sparks imagination, but rather cultural music of the European concert hall. More powerful than nature itself, German violin repertoire emblematizes “a changing social order.”33 The shifting “social order” is most obviously traced in the novel through theological questions regarding whether to reformulate or remain true to a Christian orthodoxy that no longer speaks to the people, but it is also marked by different perceptions about music. While Catherine finds activities that gratify the senses problematic but eventually learns to value rural singing classes, and Robert realizes that beauty and music help to humanize the urban poor, Rose combines passion and discipline through hours of dedicated practice and by playing German repertoire, which was perceived to be structured feeling. The emotive element is noteworthy, for it is meant differently from earlier in the century, when German music and socio-political organizations shared a metaphoric network that assisted in conceptualizing managed collectives. In Charles Auchester, for instance, passionate musical feeling supported an ordered State. In Robert Elsmere, however, Rose’s impassioned music is, like Robert’s religion, set up in contrast to the burden of the past and Catherine’s puritanical conceits. Because music can communicate the modern, Rose’s performances can be equated with Robert’s expression of a modern Christianity, which highlights the novel’s foggy treatment of individual leadership and group response. On the one hand, Rose and Robert are similar in their effective emotional addresses to audiences. Although Robert’s theology is ideabased, he communicates charismatically through his “spirit” and the “religious passion which, radiating from him, began after a while, to kindle the whole body of men about him” (505). Similarly, he ignites gatherings in “West End drawing-rooms” (505) and thus founds a movement – a “whole body” – that straddles the classes through his ability to kindle “the human heart” (578). Rose’s performances likewise captivate audiences. In providing afterdinner music for a gathering that had not previously heard her play (except for Catherine), Rose chooses some Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms. They had not played twenty bars before the attention of every one in the room was more or less seized – unless we except Mr. Bickerton, whose children, good soul, were all down with some infantile ailment or other [ . . . ].



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First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage, nonEuropean; then a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, broken here and there by strange barbaric clashes; then a song, plaintive and clinging, rich in the subtlest shades and melancholies of modern feeling. “Ah, but excellent!” said Lady Charlotte once, under her breath, at a pause; “and what entrain – what beauty!” [ . . . ] Then the slow passionate sweetness of the music swept her away with it, she being in her way a connoisseur, and she ceased to speculate. When the sounds ceased there was silence for a moment. Mrs. Darcy, [ . . . ] stared at Rose with open mouth. So did Catherine. Perhaps it was then for the first time that, touched by this publicity, this contagion of other people’s feelings, Catherine realised fully against what a depth of stream she had been building her useless barriers. (238–9; original emphasis) I cite the passage at length because it contains several important elements regarding individuality and the leader’s influence on a group. The audience’s response does not quite align with crowd theory because music does not “seize” everyone present: Bickerton remains concerned for his children. The scene, however, is an interesting precursor to how the audience listens in Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), which conflates the developing discourse of crowd theory with the audience’s response to the diva. Even Catherine, who had heard her sister many times previously, responds to Rose’s public playing and the “contagion of other people’s feelings.” “Contagion” is part of the vocabulary of crowd theory, referring to the notion that there is a permeability between the people making up a collective body, allowing thought patterns, ideas, emotions and beliefs to be shared. By the late 1870s and early 1880s, listening, gazing or reading were perceived to have the potential to infect an audience through a process of “nervous mimicry,” as people witnessed someone portraying or actually suffering from disease.34 As I argue elsewhere, the process of infectious imitation was not always perceived as degenerative; suggestibility, some commentators maintained, could also initiate progressive social development.35 Similarly, Gage McWeeny recognizes competing notions about aggregates in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, including that Arnold identified culture, with its communication of sentiment, as better than science and politics in managing the unruly crowd.36 While Rose’s audience is far from insurgent, it is nonetheless true that her playing draws them together in ways that fit the discourse of the crowd more than that of disciplined collectives. Moreover, as Catherine moves from her isolated





Northern valley to the more cultivated South, she encounters public response to a music that is not only whimsically programmed instead of well thought-out, but which also expresses savageness, “barbaric” harmony, and “modern feeling.” The communication of modernity through music thus affects Catherine in ways that reflect retrograde primitiveness while also suggesting the onward press of the country, which she registers through music “publicity.” Moved by the “stream” of modernity, conservative Catherine is initially more responsive to music than to her husband’s theological ideas. Loosely implied in this scene are Arnold’s notions of culture’s power in helping self-development, which leads to social progress in part through establishing an ordered response, such as this enthralled audience experiences. There are, however, tensions in Ward’s novel because she expresses multiple notions of audience response. Not everyone in the novel initially responds en masse to Rose’s playing, but eventually she brings collective order to congregations of people, even if they have different levels of engagement. For instance, during a “musical afternoon” (389) at the Leyburns’ London house, a quartet for violin, viola, cello and piano “took the room by storm” (394), but it does not stop a German and an English music professional from whispering during the andante about Rose’s playing. They are critically responsive, as the musical establishment encouraged, but without quiet the room is not drawn together collectively, especially as Langham listens to their conversation rather than to the music. Once the scherzo begins, however, “[t]he artist behind each woke up, and Langham heard no more, except guttural sounds of delight and quick notes of technical criticism” (394). They still comment, but less obtrusively, and the narrator indicates the change by describing the scherzo and presto, rather than dialogue. Even though professionals retain a level of critical commentary, music has the effect of bringing order to a packed room. The audience’s concentration is especially striking because so-called private concerts had different behavioral expectations than more public concerts, and their audiences did not necessarily quiet down to the same extent as occurred at public performances during the century. Here, however, dialogue ceases and the music itself becomes the narrator’s topic. Rose’s performance captures the audience’s attention, the narrator’s and therefore the reader’s, since the reader is placed in the same position as audience and narrator when the music alone is described. Culture orders the reader’s experience in two layers: the reader digests literature, but the reader also focuses on music itself. While this narrative technique communicates a group experience (audience, narrator and reader all focusing



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on culture), however, Ward’s depiction of the party remains somewhat confused because it includes notions of intellectual focus (the managed group) and sensational influence (the crowd). Nor is there just one idea about the individual in the novel, as we can see when we examine the notion of discipline. Earlier in the century, German music had been associated with ordered collectives, but in Robert Elsmere, there is neither the expectation of disciplined, intellectual audience response, nor are large collective music-making bodies represented (e.g., orchestras). Rather, it is the regimen of the individual performer – Rose’s passionate hours of practicing – that the novel depicts. The violinist’s discipline allows her to join Robert in persuasively communicating the “modern spirit,” for even German repertoire that combines the Hellenic and Hebraic relies on the performer to disseminate its message. Simultaneously, both Robert and Rose learn another side of the modern: the moral slackness of fashionable society with its worship of individual personalities. Robert successfully deflects society hostess Madame Netteville’s attempted seduction and Rose learns the depravity of the French actress, Madame Desforêts, whom she had habitually defended. In other words, there are two notions of individuality in the novel and both are figured musically: disciplined genius and selfish caprice. Arnold again provides a key to understanding Ward’s portrayals. Just as he finds the pursuit of perfection crucial to individual and social progress, Arnold implicitly examines capriciousness when he condemns excessive individualism, arguing in the essay “Doing as One Likes” that Liberal laissezfaire attitudes hinder national cohesion.37 This chapter in Culture and Anarchy was written as a reaction to the Hyde Park riots of 1866 and suggests culture as an antidote to the violent working-class crowd – a response that agrees with the rational recreation movement earlier in the century, rather than being an entirely fresh idea on Arnold’s part. Given other movements during the century that identified a close interaction between music and socio-political realities (e.g., the sight-singing movement of the forties), it is easy to see how these notions of culture’s social role become identified specifically with music in Ward’s fiction. Arnold’s ideas about individuality are confusing, however, because he conflates the self-interest of the individual with mob identity. As McWeeny has noticed, Arnold fluidly shifts between the singular and plural in discussing anarchy: “this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert [ . . . ] his right to hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes.”38 Individuality is potentially worrying because it can lead to large-scale social anarchy: a





man becomes a “body of men” even as that body is then described as the singular “he.” Making individuality and collectivity dependent upon one another occurs in terms of the opposite pole, too. Arnold’s notion of a higher social order – a calm, collective State – begins in individualism: in perfecting oneself through culture and transcending class identity, of being alienated and therefore individual. Following notions emphasized by politicians like Disraeli and men of letters like Coleridge and Carlyle,39 Arnold argues for responsible national leadership by a disciplined cultural elite. He may not propose creative geniuses as political actors, but Arnold does desire a nation of people who responsibly choose to subordinate (discipline) individual desire for collective good (order). Ward’s novel similarly approves of social advancement through disciplined, artistic expression (and theological change), rather than specifically political action. Rose’s performing modern Teutonic music is a muscular force of modernity, which she actively communicates in rural England, industrial cities, and London, hopefully instigating social progress in a way quite different from political demonstrations. Simultaneously, the fictional work grapples with the role of the genius artist – especially one who combines disciplined practice with an ignorance of more serious universal issues like human perfection. Moreover, what happens when such cultural expression is placed next to puritanical repression (Catherine)? The result is a seeming capriciousness (Rose), even while the music is produced through managed time and diligent practice, or what are identified as prerequisites for “genius” by various authors of the day – a point I return to below. Robert Elsmere disapproves of Rose’s enjoyment of popularity and her headstrong individuality, suggesting that the violinist’s wild personality manifests “the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself,” as Arnold termed it.40 Other characters criticize Rose for loving to be oppositional – for doing as she likes – similar to Arnold’s pronouncement against democracy as being “anarchy.” She must learn to find a middle ground – not embracing Catherine’s Hebraism, but also not being such a Hellenic personality. Rose herself grows more like Arnold’s definition of Germanic music: expressive but steady. In the course of the novel, she becomes increasingly like the retiring, inward, person of culture advocated by Arnold, whereby self-development – attaining a “best self” – advances society.41 Indeed, both leaders, Robert and Rose, fade away from their public tasks at the novels’ end: Robert through death, Rose through matrimony. Ward, known for her anti-suffrage campaigns, perhaps unsurprisingly if disappointingly, finally retires Rose to a wealthy marriage, but only after the violinist has been the interpreter of Teutonic music, expressive



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of an ideal modernity. Rose’s characterization thus demonstrates both a desire to move forward into modernity and a belief in strong social forces like marriage, where asserting personal liberty (“doing as one likes”) is ideally less important. Modernity does not equal individuality according to Ward’s fiction, perhaps especially for women. Giving up the personal freedom of career for marriage is a gendered implication of Arnold’s belief in the “dream of right reason to which the assertion of our freedom is to be subordinated.”42 If Arnold identifies the State as “the nation in its collective and corporate character, [ . . . ] controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals,”43 then for women the greatest national good is precisely the state of marriage and motherhood so lauded in Victorian Britain. Rose thus characterizes the tensions of the transitional eighties between two seemingly contradictory poles of individuality and social cohesion, with the dialectic resolving into a national welfare that triumphs over individual caprice, even as it relies on the expression of Hellenic/Hebraic culture by geniuses in order to advance human society.

The emergence of creative individuality Growing out of an earlier period, these ideas about the artist as social leader have a long lineage in nineteenth-century Britain, extending from Coleridge and Carlyle through to Ruskin and Arnold. As seen in the present volume, in the second half of the century the perceived role of the musician, specifically, developed. The nature of this progression is made clear when reading a mid-century novel that presents two opposing views of genius and selfish caprice, thus providing an index for the change occurring in the subsequent half century. G.H. Lewes, a prolific writer on intellectual, artistic and social matters, published a novel in 1848 that depicts English opera production as sorely lacking in discipline and dedication to art itself. In Rose, Blanche, and Violet, composer/painter Cecil Chamberlayne misunderstands what genius is, thinking it a “divine caprice,” a moment of inspiration that artists await.44 The narrator corrects this perception, describing how “Cecil wanted the animal energy and resolution necessary for empire over himself. Much as he wished for reputation, he could not nerve himself to the labour of creating it” (2: 122–3, 124). According to the novel, genius is less about native ability and more about discipline, which makes a lesson of Cecil and poet Hester Mason, both of whom are eventually ruined by succumbing to the glitter of fashionable society, gambling, and prostitution rather than laboring for art. Lewes’s companion,





George Eliot, later developed these themes when Middlemarch’s (1871–1872) Will Ladislaw ponders whether one can be a genius without producing a product and when Daniel Deronda’s (1876) composer Julius Klesmer communicates the discipline required by geniuses. In contrast, Shaw’s Love among the Artists depicts the diligent craftsmanship of would-be bourgeois artists who have learned discipline, but cannot then create inspired art. Dilettantism is criticized by Lewes’s novel, but so is the professional London music world, which is similarly torn apart by ego. Through social networking, Cecil manages to interest piano virtuosi and composer Ignaz Moscheles in rehearsing the opera in the presence of librettist Alfred Bunn, who helped to establish English opera and jointly managed Drury Lane and Covent Garden.45 With Moscheles at the piano, and singers including English baritone Henry Phillips and tenor John Wilson, Cecil’s opera earns guarded praise from Bunn, who agrees to give the opera a trial run. However, the singers object to their parts (one desires better costumes and another protests against playing second tenor) and Cecil’s rewriting destroys the opera. Unlike Vittoria, where realism is emphasized and music serves not only the drama but also a political purpose, ego is stressed in Rose, Blanche, and Violet when the narrator satirically comments on the star system: Owing to the beautiful arrangements of our dramatic system, the “stars” have not only absolute right to dictate to authors and composers, but also in effect to dictate to managers. They would all cut down a play or an opera to single parts if they could; and while ludicrously sensitive to their own reputation, are remorselessly indifferent to the author’s as well as to the manager’s purse. [ . . . ] While vanity, pretension, and injustice, in other shapes, are laughed at and exposed, why do they escape when they appear in the preposterous demands of actors, singers, and dancers? (3: 55) The music is not even mentioned in this passage. Rather, “vanity, pretension, and injustice,” on all rungs of the artistic ladder, guarantee the opera’s failure. The implication is that composer and singers alike should be more attentive to art itself. In fact, Cecil’s opera initially reflected nineteenth-century advances in artistic subject matter by concentrating on the “daughter of a vulgar cheesemonger” (3: 54) instead of royalty or nobility. Even though the composer treats the subject comically rather than seriously, his topic is still unique, as shown by the prima donna’s refusal to participate because she had been used to play



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“spangled princesses” or “picturesque peasants,” and desired to excite “sentiment,” not laughter (3: 54). Ultimately, Cecil’s imaginative subject is ruined by the caprice of the star system, which is portrayed as particularly ridiculous and sad because of the waning fame of the musical personalities depicted by Lewes. These individuals were used to star treatment, being connected with the production of Michael William Balfe’s popular operas.46 They were, however, all diminishing in London operatic import by 1848: Bunn retired from Drury Lane in that year, Moscheles left London in 1846 after having been mostly active as a teacher for several seasons, Phillips experienced professional trouble throughout the forties, and Wilson was by 1841 best known for his touring “Scottish table entertainments”47 rather than London operatic performances. Although Balfe’s career continued to flourish at home and abroad, suggesting the health of the emerging English opera tradition, the novel portrays native opera as beset with problems. Cecil’s talent, although promising, is finally overwhelmed by the egos of prominent singers during a period of their fading fame. Lewes depicts the undisciplined composer, but this portrayal of the composer was transforming even as he wrote, and would continue to change throughout the century. As early as 1853 in England (if not 1844 in the French “Euphonia”), fiction figures the composer as having sociopolitical purpose, from the musico-political ideas expressed in Charles Auchester, Erewhon and “Euphonia,” to contrasts between the “puerile state of [English] culture”48 and a more universal awareness of human potential, as expressed by eccentric genius composers in Daniel Deronda, Love among the Artists and, as I will show, E.F. Benson’s Dodo. Even though Robert Elsmere demonstrates uncertainty and unease about the role of individuality, other English fictions of this period make the disciplined composer a more straightforward voice of human progress. Steadiness and regimen become attributes of creative individuality, practiced in private, which then guide the public as they find expression in musical compositions. Benson presents his eponymous protagonist of Dodo, with her unthinking outspokenness, as in special need of just this sort of disciplined steering. Dodo was an instant hit when it appeared in 1893, surprising its firsttime author by selling out within a month and going into a twelfth edition within a year.49 The novel fictionalizes a real group of friends called “The Souls,” a subset within the elite who considered themselves antiPhilistine, sparklingly intellectual, and fiercely separate from the majority of tedious nobles. Dodo is most probably based on Margot Tennant, the vibrant daughter of a Scottish industrialist, who was at the center of





“The Souls.”50 While she is certainly witty and therefore entertaining, the fictional portrait of Dodo also frowns on her selfishness. Born to a “proprietor of a flourishing iron foundry somewhere in Lancashire,” the aptly-named Dodo Vane marries the wealthy Lord Chesterford in order to secure a permanent position in “Society,”51 and then cannot love her spouse or child, prioritizes aesthetic pleasure over her husband’s genuine religious views, and eventually commits adultery. Dodo does, however, occasionally evince authentic emotion and the potential for more responsible life choices, as when she responds to music. Privately enclosed while open to the public gaze, the opera box provides an ideal setting for conflicting notions of social awareness and individual discipline in Dodo: Edith Staines and Miss Grantham were seated together in a box at the opera. The first act was just over, and Edith, who had mercilessly silenced every remark Miss Grantham had made during it, relaxed a little. Miss Grantham’s method of looking at an opera was to sit with her back to the stage, so as to command a better view of the house, and talk continuously. But Edith would not stand that. She had before her a large quarto containing the full score, and she had a pencil in her hand with which she entered little corrections, and now and then she made comments to herself. “I shall tell Mancinelli of that,” she murmured. “The whole point of the motif is that rapid run with the minim at the end, and he actually allowed that beast to make a rallentando. [ . . . ] I had to hurry over dinner in order to get here in time. The overture is one of the best parts. It isn’t like so many overtures that give you a sort of abstract of the opera, but it hints at it all, and leaves you to think it out.” “Oh, I didn’t hear the overture,” said Miss Grantham. “I only got here at Mephistopheles’ appearance. I think Edouard is such a dear. He really looks a very attractive devil.” (1: 190–1) Edith Staines and Miss Grantham display two distinctly different behavioral modes in attending a performance of Charles-François Gounod’s Faust (1859). Edith, modeled on composer Ethel Smyth, listens with silence and professional dedication, studying the score, commenting on performance practice, and arriving for the overture because of its compositional quality.52 In contrast, Miss Grantham, another member of the fictionalized “Souls,” exhibits more interest in the human drama of the audience, is unconcerned about arriving late, and finds handsome Mephistopheles the only motivation for observing the stage. Despite the fact that certain



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norms of concert behavior were in place by the eighties and nineties, there were still occasions when disparate behavior occurred at the concert hall and opera house, as we can also see in music reviews. Besides a comment on whether the recommendations of the music profession were being seriously applied, music scenes in novels also simply mix the classes within the public sphere for purposes of plot conflict and character development. Unlike the 1880s novels that I have discussed, in the fin-de-siècle Dodo the elite do not demonstrate en masse an awareness of concert etiquette, but perhaps the differences may be attributed to class since this novel is about the nobility rather than the bourgeoisie. Certainly, selfish Miss Grantham is a representative blue blood in this satiric novel, desiring pleasure and entertainment at others’ expense. In contrast, not only is Edith a music professional, a genius and a female composer, but she is also bourgeois, having a grandfather who made his fortune as “a draper in Leeds” (2: 370). Her studious habits contrast with those of the daughter of Sir and Lady Grantham, and even of Lady Dodo Chesterford, who may have been born into the wealthy middle class, but for all intents and purposes belongs to fashionable, titled London society. Moreover, Edith is very much identifiable as a “New Woman” type. According to Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, this slippery term encompasses a number of “new, or newly perceived, forms of femininity” that found expression in the 1880s and 1890s. At the time, there were complex and contradictory definitions of what goals and activities New Women held in common, but Richardson and Willis identify some shared traits: “her perceived newness, her autonomous self-definition and her determination to set her own agenda in developing an alternative vision of the future.”53 The last two items in the list are particularly interesting for their overlap with how genius composers of both sexes were envisioned in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Composing, smoking, and shooting, loud Edith stands outside uppercrust protocol, just as she is at a remove from dissembling behavior. As her actions represent her individuality, so does her music reflect perceptive awareness of a larger life. When Dodo hears Edith’s music, for instance, she felt “that there was something in this world better and bigger, perhaps, than her own little hair-splittings and small emotions” (1: 134). Indeed, the Wagnerite Edith provides a key for universal awareness that recalls Klesmer in Daniel Deronda. Just as the genius Klesmer challenges the musically-sensitive protagonist Gwendolen Harleth to experience a larger sense of life, so does Edith suggest greater possibilities to Dodo, whose musical sensibilities include playing the banjo, singing French





songs, and collecting castanets. It is Edith who tries to exert guiding influence on Dodo at moments of moral crisis, and Edith’s ethical firmness fits the discipline and steadiness she exhibits by concentrating in the opera box and through her regular early-morning composition sessions. Edith is an intriguing choice for the moral fiber of Dodo for reasons beyond what we see in the pages of the novel. The character is recognizably modeled on Ethyl Smyth, a prominent composer of symphonies and operas (stereotypically considered “male” forms of composition) who became famous for her masculine conduct and outspoken advocacy for women’s suffrage. The author personally knew Smyth through her love affair with Benson’s sister, Nelly – conduct which prompted strong expressions of disapproval by Benson’s father, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who attempted to control family behavior. His success rate did not equal his moral rigor, however, since several Bensons were involved in samesex relationships, including his wife.54 Fascinatingly, E.F. Benson’s novel finds such a non-traditional character as Smyth, a New Woman living outside mainstream society and his own group of frothy friends, the force to establish a disciplined humanity beyond class expectations. Similar to Klesmer, who seemed eccentric to other characters in Daniel Deronda but not necessarily to the reader, Edith’s outrageous behavior fits a specific “type” that invokes not only the New Woman, but also Beethoven: a stroppy composer existing outside polite society who nonetheless exerts the influence of genius. Precisely the diligence emphasized by new institutional practices in post-Enlightenment Europe continues to surface in British novels as necessary to social and political evolution. In the last quarter of the century, collective groups may not always exhibit managed behavior, but the idea of ordered dedication to excellence is extolled by those who would advance society. As Klesmer states to Gwendolen, “[g]enius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline” (1: 385). This discipline is then given a political purpose by Klesmer who compares musicians and statesmen during after-dinner conversation with his employers, the well-to-do Arrowpoints. “We help to rule the nations and make the age as much as any other public men,” he jealously fires at Miss Arrowpoint’s would-be suitor, Mr Bult. “And a man who speaks effectively through music is compelled to something more difficult than parliamentary eloquence” (1: 363). Aesthetic production continues to be the best awakening, as seen in Dodo’s responsiveness to Edith’s symphony and Gwendolen’s awareness during Klesmer’s fantasia of a “breadth of horizon” (1: 67). Through composition, Genius speaks publicly, and listeners are affected not because they focus on structural analysis and



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what music educators have taught them to value, but rather because they are sensitive to music that broadens horizons. Thus during the second half of the century, there is a marked shift in how culture is meant to lead society. In the later novels, contemporary musicians become agents for specific messages of universal awareness. They awaken other characters, while also reminding the reading public of the guiding function of the aesthetic; not only does Genius help to awaken the protagonist, who may or may not grow, but the reader can decipher the message, even if the fictional characters cannot. The musical genius often becomes the self-reflexive voice of the novel itself and its vision of a better nation, of an evolving Englishness.

Responsive listening, individuality, and social advancement Similarly, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) chisels away at the perceptions of overall social cohesion, depicting a subculture of individuals who are even more cultured than the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In her collections of dialogic essays, Baldwin (1886) and Althea (1894), Vernon Lee introduces an evolutionary template to this group, calling it an upper class within the upper class, who are the seed of the aristocracy of the future.55 In Baldwin, she compares this creative, innovative group to the majority, whose activities and thoughts have been taught to them “throughout generations by others who have gradually learned it from the men who did invent or develop it.”56 Although usually discussed in terms of Decadence or Aestheticism, Vernon Lee’s ideas also agree with Matthew Arnold’s earlier pronouncement in Culture and Anarchy of the middle classes as Philistine, as opposed to those “aliens”57 who pursue human perfection in a way that transcends class. The latter, alienated within their natal class because they pursue general concerns rather than self-interest, may or may not be “genius[es]” with heaven-bestowed talent; regardless, they are nursed by culture and transform their class through dedication to human perfection, while experiencing difficulties in doing so.58 Literature, espousing the values of a moral culture within a spiritual atmosphere, was Arnold’s model for cultural dissemination. With this paradigm, Arnold built on Coleridge’s ideas (following Burke) of a person’s inward, cultivated consciousness that was associated with institutions supporting these private processes; the notion of “culture” as a social ideal could be practically applied through expanding national education. It is this learning process, however, which could be problematic if it simply continued “stock notions





and habits,” instead of finding through culture “a more free play of consciousness,”59 as Arnold suggests. Vernon Lee expresses similar thoughts to Arnold, criticizing education because of the lack of individuality. Her pronouncement constructively interprets what was a growing sense of the primacy of the individual, discussed in Chapter 5, and she joins Ward in giving a musical configuration to her ideas. Vernon Lee, however, stresses eighteenth-century repertoire rather than current music, and concentrates on the musical responsiveness of listeners instead of the communicative composer’s voice. Rather than supporting rational analysis of a composition’s formal structure, she envisions audience reaction as corporeal and reflexive. In many ways, Vernon Lee’s ideas harmonize with Edmund Gurney’s emphasis on the “essential and undefinable emotion”60 of music – an idea familiar from my earlier discussion of Shaw’s fiction. Even though Gurney is against Wagner while Shaw argues for progressive music, both make similar observations about late-century audience conduct. The musical values espoused by the elite are the ones that the musical establishment worked so hard to promote earlier in the century. But while the concert audience assumes an attitude of concentrated listening, Gurney questions whether the individuals making up the silent mass were actually listening well. Moreover, were they feeling confident in their ability to evaluate compositional quality? As Gurney states in The Power of Sound (1880): “My experience is that, of all sorts of amateurs, musical amateurs, in the wide sense which would include all to whom Music gives deep pleasure, stand oftenest in need of most definite encouragement and reassurance.” Gurney believes that amateurs deserve support because they show remarkable discrimination, demonstrating a “sort of understanding which is worth more than all the technical knowledge in the world.”61 Following the popularity of Darwinian theories of acquired or inherited associations, Gurney questions whether educated listening can be pleasurable, with the vogue for Wagner especially suspect because of what Gurney believed were intrinsic deficiencies in the music.62 Yet even though they query education, by emphasizing the inherent value of different repertoires, Edmund Gurney and Vernon Lee imply that some guidance is necessary in order to guarantee the onward step of English evolution. People cannot help being emotionally responsive to music, but different musical styles will engender either spiritual health or morbidity. Althea’s author maintains that while the modern music of Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg and Gabriel Fauré may be most emotionally moving,63 eighteenth-century music like Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo et Euridice (1762) suggests ideal states and ennobles



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individuals because it calls forth their remembrances of other “holy” (87) emotions, essentially creating an amplified nobleness. The process of association inspires the listener to become better. Like Gurney, Vernon Lee builds on current theories of physiological associationism, or the idea that there are materialist memory processes within an individual and the race. The stakes of musical programming are high, for despite Angela Leighton’s assessment of Vernon Lee’s thoughts on music as mostly oriented toward “pure aestheticism, beyond moral and social responsibility,”64 the first two chapters of Althea demonstrate how notions of culture are essential to Vernon Lee’s theories of individual and social evolution. In Chapter 1, “The Value of the Individual,” the author builds from Arnold’s notions of a connection between self- and social-improvement: Certainly self-culture, in the right sense of the word, is not the cold and selfish thing you imagined. In our day, when the world is crying out for renovation, [ . . . ] we are bound to be in morally working order as well: to accustom ourselves to sympathize, to renounce, to aspire; in order that we may understand and be just, that we may, when the moment comes (and it comes with every reform and improvement), sympathize thoroughly, renounce easily, and inevitably move upwards. (40–1) Using the word “culture” to describe a process of moral, spiritual and intellectual self-cultivation that extends outward to “world [ . . . ] renovation” suggests the link between Althea and Culture and Anarchy. Individual growth helps to solve “the great social questions” (40) because the world evolves as cultivated people influence others. To Baldwin, the imaginary character usually identified with Vernon Lee,65 those who are enlightened have a duty to influence others. If they simply wrap themselves in their own private world then “[t]hey are doing harm in abetting, in fostering, by their silence, the vices which they do not themselves practise, and which they might, by their disapproval, diminish, in however infinitesimal a degree” (12). Thus individuality is emphasized as essential to the social sphere, in terms of its character and improvement. Unlike thencontemporary theories regarding crowd psychology, to Baldwin an individual cannot force the crowd nor will the crowd “be yielding for ever” (47). Rather, “there is life and power throughout the mass” and “such as we are, we, its component atoms, it also is” (47, 48). Far from being a static mass or a population moved by institutionalized efforts, its “life and power” depend on cultivated individuals responsibly stepping from private to public roles.





The next chapter, “Orpheus in Rome,” comprises a discussion between three characters who consider ancient versus modern music in terms informed by the first chapter’s discussion of the role of culture. Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice is given a specifically social configuration because it is contrasted to the high Victorian orientation toward the “social.” As a proponent of classic music, the character Donna Maria defines “becoming modern” as a “congestion of the brain and malaria,” whereby Baldwin has (temporarily) “let all the dreadful things of the day – pauperism, and scepticism, and the horridness of all classes, eat into his soul until he can’t think of anything else, and can’t enjoy any art, or any simple, pleasant thing” (56). Spiritual depravity is as much the result of immersion in social questions as in the “most modern of all music” which “suggests all the wild beast in mankind” and in doing so “attains perhaps its most potent emotional effects, but [ . . . ] becomes morally detrimental” (85). As a result of this brand of beautiful music, one is in a “condition of nausea” (68), spoiled by “poison” (63), and perceives in an exaggerated manner. Baldwin eventually joins Donna Maria in suggesting the possibility of progressing past the present state to a condition that reverberates with the spiritual well being found in the music of Orpheus. In contrast to the “absinthe and opium and haschisch [sic]” (62) of modern life and music, Donna Maria encourages a practical use of art, whereby the “clear stream” (63) of eighteenth-century music will advance the individual through a perception of “emotion as it should be” (80). Subsequently, the Western world will evolve past its current diseased condition. This utilitarian view of musical style is combined with an emphasis on the audience’s agency as more important than that of the interpretative performer or creative composer. According to Baldwin, “[g]reat as is the art of the artist, the art is more potent still of him who perceives, who connects the single work, the single art, with life, intermeshing it with all life’s nerves and arteries” (103). Although Baldwin concedes that not necessarily all performing artists are insensible to the ennobling character of classic art, generally “Orpheus in Rome” argues for the audience as most important for connecting the “work [ . . . ] with life.” A balanced state of self-cultivation allows one to perceive the world naturally. Even though Althea’s focus on the audience’s agency over the composer’s differentiates it from Robert Elsmere, Daniel Deronda, and Dodo, Vernon Lee does not hold her ideas in a vacuum. Her orientation aligns with Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, rev. 1891), for instance. In “Orpheus in Rome,” the last of the trio of characters, Carlo, observes that “we have all seen instances of artists, not merely



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singers and actors, but painters and writers, being apparently totally impervious, foreign to the sort of impression which their work produces; living unconscious of the kind of images and emotions which their art awakens in others” (100). Similarly, when Dorian observes actress Sibyl Vane on stage, he passionately desires the performer who innocently channels aesthetic beauty, who “stir[s] my imagination.”66 But when Sibyl discovers her own emotions, Dorian abandons her because he harshly judges the reality as “shallow and stupid” (87). It was precisely her naïveté that fed her acting, and she was unaware of “the kind of images and emotions” that she inspired in others. Infused with fictional elements of dialogue and plot, Vernon Lee’s essays also join a family of Victorian literature that blurs the boundaries between critical-rational writing and aesthetic prose. Through its complex arguments, Althea leans toward the critical-rational, but its aesthetics of listening introduce a poetic element to the writing style and content. “Orpheus in Rome” is like Vittoria in making a retelling of an opera, and its effect on the audience, into its narrative substance for spans of pages. But while Meredith innovatively replaces the narrator’s voice with opera libretto, Vernon Lee mostly sticks to describing impressions of the music and its associations with nature. Of course, Vernon Lee could probably rely on many of her readers being familiar with Orfeo and therefore does not need explicitly to describe the sonic form and textures of the opera. Her narrator simply explains, “the violins played the last bars of the famous air ‘Che farò senza Euridice’ ” (104), and otherwise concentrates on the actions on stage. But because the narrative describes the opera in terms of the audience’s interpretations of the singers’ gestures, it not only enacts the content of the three characters’ dialogue regarding associationism, but also elevates the dry debate into florid prose, packed with emotive language and figures of speech. At the same time, the similes and metaphors serve more than poetic purpose alone; they depict the physiological associationism that underpins Vernon Lee’s aesthetic philosophy. When Orpheus searches for Eurydice in the underworld, for instance, the narrator describes, “he made his way into the crowd, turning aside with outstretched arms, like so much woodland leafage, the creatures that he met” (96). The foliage analogy clearly relates to the audience’s perceptions, rather than being something the actor intends. For just as Carlo associates real rustling pines with “violins” and “tenors” (75), the narrator describes his response to Donna Maria’s whimsical gift of branches to the diva thus: “A breath of south-west wind among the pine trees, a scent of bay leaves and shaken spruce, of growing grass and opening





flowers, swept across Carlo’s mind” (100). Althea depicts the listeners’ physiological associationism rather than simply representing verse set to music or the stage action. The resulting prose style combines ideas about artistic beauty with actual mental science, for Vernon Lee’s interest in physical responsiveness in aesthetics derived in large part from a composite of William James’s exploration of the connection between mind and body in Principles of Psychology (1890) and Theodor Lipps’s and Carl Lange’s psychological theories.67 Of course, Meredith also merged scientific theories and critical debate with lyrical expression, but the two authors represent their ideas differently. Meredith makes more of the deliberate intentions of librettist, composers, and singers, and portrays the audience’s combination of thought and reflexivity, while Vernon Lee shows how associative processes not only influence listeners but also encourage them to discuss critically why they instinctively respond as they do.

Conclusion: Howards End Besides being a repeating motif in Victorian literary prose, people gathering to make and listen to ennobling music was part of daily life at the time. As we have seen, the musical establishment employed educational methods ranging from publishing program notes to mass sight-singing movements. Philanthropists followed the idea that a single nation could be formed through cultural activity, but in practice multiple communities were promoted through such means as segregated seating at concerts and teaching different types of musical literacy (staff notation, Tonic Sol-fa). This partitioning did not completely separate people from different walks of life, however, and when the classes brushed together, conflict ensued. Novels of the period represent this complex picture. Depicting genius composers or intrinsically moral music may reflect Victorian ideas about raising the people through culture, but fictional works also make use of musical performances as sites where the classes quite simply find themselves – sometimes uncomfortably – in the same space.68 The legacy of these last ideas is famously found in E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) where the clerk Leonard Bast meets the middle-class Schlegel family at a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. According to the narrator, music brings people together: “It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it. [ . . . ] and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings.”69 Cheap seats may allow the classes to rub shoulders, but



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impoverished Leonard who has learned Victorian democratic ideals and “was obliged to assert gentility” (58) through culture, will never achieve the same easy discussion of music as the leisured, socialist Schlegels. In other words, the classes meet through venues first established by nineteenth-century philanthropists, but the social gulf between the classes remains. When the Schlegels try to bridge the gap in the name of “[t]emperance, tolerance and sexual equality” (41), a cross-class liaison occurs between Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast, with the disastrous result being Leonard’s death. Leonard, ironically, dies when a bookcase falls on him, thus he is literally killed by culture. The Beethoven Fifth scene is also interesting for depicting a mingling of modes of listening; it does not suggest that there is only one, EMRinspired type of audience engagement, although that is represented, too: Whether you are like Mrs Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come – of course, not so as to disturb the others; or like Helen, who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Fräulein Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is “echt Deutsche”; or like Fräulein Mosebach’s young man, who can remember nothing but Fräulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion of your life becomes more vivid (44–5) Despite the silence once the music begins (“Oh dear! We mustn’t talk” [45], exclaims the Schlegels’ aunt, Mrs Munt) this is not a united group. The audience now remains silent, but it does not practice structural analysis en masse, nor does it respond to the music with the collective physiological associationism described in Althea. Rather than a cohesive Victorian experience, where everyone is coordinated mentally as well as physically, the scene emphasizes individuality because each person appreciates the concert differently: Mrs Munt taps the tunes, Helen Schlegel constructs a narrative, Margaret Schlegel “see[s]” the music, Tibby Schlegel analyzes structure, cousin Fräulein Mosebach makes nationalist associations, and her young man concentrates on her. While Victorian fiction often only explored one or two listening styles within a single novel, here many types of music appreciation are brought together. Difference is still emphasized, despite the reigning silence that may appear to unify the audience, and it serves to initiate conflict in the novel. Howards End continues trends established in Victorian cultural movements, while also demonstrating decidedly modernist preoccupations. Here, the audience





functions as a group of individuals; it is not the mass that Lucy Snowe struggled against in Villette. While Victorian novels and music trade journals expressed the public problems of uniting the classes – the sometimes noisy and violent behavioral clashes when class groupings conducted themselves differently – Forster’s novel explores the private ramifications of this Victorian movement. Instead of forming a calm “one nation” ideal or a radical crowd, listening to music highlights difference in responsiveness, and this diversity fuels romantic and personal conflict. Of course, some of this orientation reflects broad changes in fiction, as modern novels turned toward exploring the psyche. Howards End, however, also simply investigates the conflict inherent in bringing people together, across the classes. Despite the fact that Victorian philanthropists began as early as the 1840s to educate the working classes to find value in music, in part to help create a conflict-free nation, the fact is that the classes still had vastly different notions of culture by the early twentieth century. There continued to be at least “two nations,” to use Disraeli’s label, and culture serves to emphasize the divide and maintain a hierarchy. Obviously, the concert hall and opera house were still places to meet and greet, flirt and court, but with different results than when the audiences were mostly of the same class or were separated by reserved seating.



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The previous chapters examine how British authors connected musical assemblies and ways of imagining community during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and how these conceptual paradigms continued in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century fiction. While there was, broadly speaking, a continuing desire for overarching order through public Culture and corporate bodies during high Victorianism, by the transitional eighties there was an increasing fracturing of the belief in group character, with exponentially greater emphasis placed on the individual to whom art had predominately private meaning. My particular focus has been on fictional works that have both critical and aesthetic function. As we have seen, novels published in the forties and fifties, including Villette and Charles Auchester, look at concepts of materialism and how Victorian fiction positions music against it, not least through exploring how the arts are necessary to the developing bourgeois self. Moreover, Charles Auchester joins other fiction like Erewhon and “Euphonia, ou la ville musicale” that represent well-managed civic communities and musical ensembles as mutually constituted. Turning to the 1860s, Sandra Belloni and its sequel, Vittoria, show how nationalist music was thought to inspire patriots to rise up en masse against occupying forces. By the 1880s and moving into the twentieth century, rather than celebrating musical aggregates, literary prose like Love among the Artists, Robert Elsmere, Dodo, Althea, and Howards End depicts a subculture of individuals who are more cultured than the mass of bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Because I investigate understandings of music and community as constructed among a variety of discourses, the current project examines a wide range of non-fiction prose, too. Alongside discussions of nineteenthcentury music, we have explored institutional management, crowd theory, 185



Conclusion


evolutionary biology, mental science, climate theory, socialism, utilitarianism, and social and political history. An especially important recurring touchstone has been how music journalists and fiction writers tell different stories about what happened at concerts and the opera, which suggests how crucial it is to take literary accounts into consideration when thinking about the nineteenth-century musical world. Besides detailing the professional musician’s understanding of concert behavior, musicologists need to remember the views of society at large. Similarly, students of literature will benefit from considering how pervasive music was in Victorian England, what agendas fueled the music profession, and how literature conversed with the discourse of music. The implications of my findings for musical and literary studies have been traced throughout the preceding pages, with the introduction explicitly suggesting the import to future scholarship in these disciplines. In particular, I have looked at music, nation, and class within fiction, but there are also other ways to think about the subject of music and community formation. We might further discuss audience behavior and class, for example. While nineteenth-century literary prose evinces a general trend within the bourgeoisie toward more concentrated listening, regardless of focus on the performer or composer, Italian or Austro-German repertoire, it is difficult to tell from fictional works what trends occurred within the titled gentry since narratives concerning concert and opera attendance focus mostly on middle-class characters. Perhaps the novels’ orientation reflects the fact that remaining silent became a specific stress for the bourgeoisie during a century when they increased in prosperity. James H. Johnson proposes in Listening in Paris that silence in the early nineteenth-century French concert hall resulted from self-doubt, fear and fresh expectations that affluence was based on wealth instead of birth. This shift created newly silent audiences, he suggests.1 It is not in the scope of my project to examine if a similar psychology was operating in England, but it is possible that analogous class-based behavioral influences were at work on English concert etiquette and may partially explain why the middle class was depicted as increasingly silent in high Victorian novels, but frequently without the orientation toward composition advocated by musical connoisseurs. There is another way of thinking about the performance site and activities occurring within it, too: we can apply to the concert hall ideas of “the social” which I outlined in the introduction. If we recall Seyla Benhabib’s definition of “assoicational” sites as “public” because of the coordinating nature of activities occurring within them, with salons functioning as an important means of introducing members of the intelligentsia to each



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other and encouraging conversation between the sexes, then we may have a template with which to understand the shift that occurred between Victorianism and literary modernism. While mid-nineteenth-century literature largely depicted the concert hall or opera house as associational, turn-of-the-century fiction acknowledged the dangerous schisms that emerged when access to cultural events was no longer regulated through a process of introduction and invitation. As concerts were literally opened to the public, especially those that were free and therefore had no designated seating, the controlled nature of the space gives way. Howards End shows the classes sitting next to each other and, while they all listen to the same composition, the audience members reveal their different backgrounds in how they attend to the performance and interact with each other. Sociability may occur, but it is no longer necessarily coordinated, harmonious, or associational. Rather, throwing open the doors of culture to all classes leads to narrative conflict in Forster’s novel, showing the deep rifts existing between individuals from different walks of life, even if they share an interest in music. Consequently, there is an interesting comparison to be made between the fact that the public concert does not assist group-formation in Howards End, and the truth that so-called private concerts in Robert Elsmere are complex demonstrations of group and individual relations. In the latter novel, even at-home concerts – the type of musical event most comparable to the “social” salon that Benhabib describes – reveal behavioral and educational differences within a crowded room rather than an entirely cohesive social experience. Throughout these pages, my goal has been to examine music within cultural context, which itself engages with a contentious issue in the field of music research today. Simply put, should we study music through so-called close listening (analyzing a composition autonomously, as a set of sonic relationships) or might we exercise a broader perspective? I believe that it is significant that literature helped to construct ideas about what music itself might be in nineteenth-century England. Literary prose unmasks a collection of ideas about music, which intersected and conversed with various Victorian discourses, often suggesting that the interaction was mutually influential. Concepts about musical groups and community formation informed one another. Some of these ideas were then enacted in the music itself, as seen in compositions growing out of the national music project, where the social import of music meant that it should contain certain sonic features. Meirion Hughes, for instance, has documented how the English press constructed Parry’s compositional style as representative of not only an English school, but also an innate Englishness. Joseph Bennett’s review of Parry’s Symphony No. 3,



Conclusion


“English,” in the Daily Telegraph stated, “the typical English melody is simple in structure, marked by rhythmic force, moves with solidity, is well-balanced [. . . and is] above all, natural. [. . .] although the themes of the symphony are, as themes, absolutely new, an Englishman cannot hear them without an inward sense of familiarity and, so to speak, a feeling of proprietorship.”2 It seems to me that it would be highly interesting to examine how some of the ideas in the preceding chapters found their way into actual musical expression. Music during the mid to late Victorian period is far more than simply “the music itself”; it is intimately connected with ideas about music’s social value and national identity. Similarly, fiction does not only use music to specific literary purpose, outside of cultural context. It demonstrates how discourses come together within the popular imagination, and how this interplay is then used within an aesthetic publication (the novel), for aesthetic purpose. Instead of engaging in critical commonplaces about the evocative nature of music or ideas about reading as a private activity, I highlight beliefs about the materiality of music and the public role of literature by considering how they help to construct nineteenth-century concepts of society, class and nation. Indeed, literature that describes musical performance not only frequently introduces a feeling discourse, as I have discussed, but it often highlights its own desire for contact with readers. George Eliot’s eponymous diva of the poem Armgart (1870) differentiates between the two art forms thus: Am I a sage whose words must fall like seed Silently buried toward a far-off spring? I sing to living men and my effect Is like the summer’s sun, that ripens corn Or now or never.3 George Eliot, commonly included in the elite group of “Victorian Sages,” writes a poem that ironically suggests how written wisdom speaks to a future audience, as compared to the immediacy of live performance, where the listener responds in the moment to the genius on stage. The comparison is slightly out of joint, for a singer is not synonymous with writer/composer, although it does make sense if we understand Armgart to be an inventive virtuoso rather than a simple translator of the composer’s notes. Regardless, by discussing such moments of direct interaction between the diva and her audience, the poem foregrounds its own desire to reach the public, as the literary author actually did in Victorian



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England even if there was a lull between putting pen to paper and opening the printed book. Ultimately, my project does more than only cross the constructed boundaries between literature and music; it addresses wider concerns, such as the nature of the “social,” the public sphere, nation formation, and class identity. The myriad discourses that I deal with might themselves be thought of as similar to the cast list of a bulky Victorian novel: complex, numerous, and yet finally cohesive, as they are all revealed to relate to each other by the last pages. Musical and literary culture was seen as having a role in creating the idea of that single, ordered universe that Victorian novelists and politicians alike portrayed. Then again, layered into my study is the idea that musical practices originating in the nineteenth century contributed not only to the notion of a single imagined community, but also to the formation of communities that struggled against each other. The reality was different from the “one nation” ideal. Certainly, a multifaceted nation inherently has tensions, contradictions, and hierarchy within its classes and other groups. Yet, finally, the important point is that various Victorian discourses present the dream of a single unit – of various pieces working harmoniously together as constituent parts of a larger whole, just like the many instruments making up an orchestra.



Conclusion

Introduction 1 Alan Hamilton, “Gratitude, respect and pride,” The Times (5 June 2002): 1. 2 See Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849); Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845); George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical (1866). 3 Peter Walton, A Celebration of Empire: A Centenary Souvenir of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria 1837–1897 (Staplehurst: Spellmont, 1997) 19. 4 Raymond Whitaker, “Royal Pageant,” Independent (5 June 2002): 5. 5 Francis Hueffer, Half a Century of Music in England, 1837–1887 (London: Chapman, 1889) 1. 6 Susan Bernstein, “On Music Framed: The Eolian Harp in Romantic Writing,” The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Phyllis Weliver (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) 71. 7 Bernstein, “On Music Framed,” 73. 8 For the “truism . . . of Victorian labour history that the years which bridged the late Chartist movement and early socialism witnessed a fundamental discontinuity in the political development of the English working class” see Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and nation in English radical politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 1. 9 Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 44–7. 10 Seyla Benhabib, “The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hanna Arendt’s Biography of Rahel Varnhagen,” Feminist Interpretations of Hanna Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) 94. 11 Benhabib, “Pariah,” 97–8. 12 Benhabib, “Pariah,” 98–9. 13 Benhabib, “Pariah,” 101. 14 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992) 93. 15 Benhabib, “Pariah,” 83–104; Hina Nazar, “The Imagination Goes Visiting: Jane Austen, Judgment, and the Social,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 59.2 (September 2004): 145–78. 16 Denise Riley, “Am I that Name?” Feminism and the category of “women” in history (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) 49. 17 Riley, “Am I that Name?” 50. 18 Riley, “Am I that Name?” 49. 19 Riley, “Am I that Name?” 51. 20 Christina Bashford, “Learning to Listen: Audiences for chamber music in early-Victorian London,” Journal of Victorian Culture 4 (1999): 29–30, 34–5. 21 Anon., “A Concert,” The Cornhill Magazine 1st ser. 5 (1862): 744–5; George Bernard Shaw, “High Society,” Star (6 December 1889), rpt in G.B.S. on Music by George Bernard Shaw (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) 59–60. 190



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22 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), Cabinet edn., 3 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1878) 3: 17. 23 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) 1. 24 Giddens, Consequences, 1. 25 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), rev. edn. (London: Verso, 1991) 7. 26 John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 118. 27 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987) 156. 28 Giddens, Consequences, 7. Original emphasis. 29 Giddens, Consequences, 7–9. 30 For metanarrative (master narrative), see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) xxiii–xxv. 31 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). 32 Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity (1992), trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 7; Luhmann, “I See Something You Don’t See,” trans. Joseph O’Neil and Elliott Schreiber, Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. William Rasch (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) 189. 33 Luhmann, Observations, 19. 34 Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere,” New German Critique 3 (1974): 49. Cited in Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992) 290. 35 Günther Lottes, Politische Aufklärung und plebejisches Publikum: Zur Theorie und Praxis des englischen Radikalismus in späten 18, Jahrhundred (Munich, 1979) 337, referenced in Eley, “Nations,” 328–9. 36 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 419. 37 John Brewer, “Commercialization and politics,” The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, eds Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb (1982; London: Hutchinson, 1983) 219. Brewer’s sources are the Northampton Mercury (11 September 1732) and A Collection of Freemason’s Songs (London, 1904) 30–2. 38 Plotz, Crowd, 10. 39 Eley, “Nations,” 326. 40 Benhabib, Situating, 108–09. 41 Plotz, Crowd, 10. 42 Plotz, Crowd, 41–2. 43 Eley, “Nations,” 291. 44 Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 101. 45 Christina Bashford, “Not Just ‘G.’: Towards a History of the Programme Note,” George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, ed. Michael Musgrave (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 133; Catherine Dale, Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 48.



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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57

58

59

60 61

62 63 64

Notes Bashford, “G,” 135 n8. Bashford, “G,” 117, 124–5. Christina Bashford, “Listen,” 25. Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) 51. Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (London: Dent, 1976) 94. Bashford, “Listen,” 36, 41. Anon., “English Audiences,” Musical Times 26 (1 September 1885): 526, 527 [hereafter MT]. J.S. Curwen, editorials, The Musical Herald 571 (October 1895): 304. My thanks to Charles McGuire for this citation. For a discussion of working-class culture as continuing after 1850, but being “flattened out” or losing its spirit, see Francis Hearn, Domination, Legitimation, and Resistance: The incorporation of the nineteenth-century English working class (Westport: Greenwood, 1978) 231–65. For upper-class conversation about the music during the interval, see Bashford, “Listen,” 35–6; Bashford, “John Ella and the Making of the Musical Union,” Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in honour of Cyril Ehrlich, eds Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 209. Morning Chronicle (28 January 1847), cited in Bashford, “Listen,” 35. Bashford, “Listen,” 30. The “two nations” are further subdivided in Sybil into competing factions. There are two types of laboring people depicted: the rational who attempt to strike peacefully and those described in bestial terms who engage in unthinking mob violence. See Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: or The Two Nations (1845; London: Penguin, 1980). Anon., “Sims Reeves, the encore nuisance and audience behaviour at a ballad concert in Liverpool,” MT 17 (1 July 1875): 137. See also Anon., “Audience behavior at Sims Reeves’ ballad concert, Oxford,” MT 13 (1 January 1869): 639; Anon., Letter, The Tonic Sol-fa Reporter (January 1865): 4; “Haslingden Mechanics’ Institution,” Blackburn Standard (10 January 1847), rpt in C. Aspin, Haslingden 1800–1900 (Haslingden: n.p., 1962) 169–70. Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987) 17, 22–4. “Sight-singing mania” appears to be Russell’s own term (22). Russell, Popular Music, 24. In fixed doh, the syllable “doh” always designates the note “c” while in moveable doh, “doh” is given to the tonic or first note of the scale. Therefore, in the key of C Major or c minor, “doh” would be “c,” but in A major or a minor, “doh” would be “a,” in D Major or d minor, “doh” would be “d,” etc. J.S. Curwen, Music at the Queen’s Accession: A paper read before the Society of Arts, March 17th, 1897 (London: Curwen, 1897) 15. Russell, Popular Music, 26. David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 282–3. Referenced in Helen Small, “A Pulse of 124: Charles Dickens and a pathology of the mid-Victorian reading public,” The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, eds James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 273–4.



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65 J.S. Curwen, The Story of Tonic Sol-fa, 10th edn. (London: J. Curwen and Sons, [1891] ) 3. 66 J.S. Curwen, Story, 4. 67 J.S. Curwen, Story, 5, 8, 10, 22. 68 J.S. Curwen, Story, 8. 69 Charles McGuire, “Music and Morality: Temperance, Tonic Sol-Fa and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius,” Chorus and Community, ed. Karen Ahlquist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 70 W.H. Cummings’ comments on W.G. McNaught “The Psychology of SightSinging,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 26 (1899–1900): 52. My thanks to Charles McGuire for this citation. 71 William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (London: Croom Helm, 1975) 25–6. 72 William Weber, “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25 (1997): 689. 73 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 329. 74 Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 96–7. 75 Winter, Mesmerized, 320–2. 76 Small, “Pulse,” 269–75. 77 Ada Nield Chew, “A Living Wage for Factory Girls at Crewe,” Crewe Chronicle (5 May 1894) n.p. Rpt in The Life and Writings of Ada Nield Chew, remembered and collected by Doris Nield Chew (1945; London: Virago, 1982) 75–6. 78 Wilkie Collins, “The Unknown Public,” Household Words 18 (August 21, 1858) 217. I am indebted to Helen Small’s “A Pulse of 124” for this source. 79 Collins, “Unknown,” 222. 80 Small, “Pulse,” 278. 81 The Athenæum (20 August 1853): 996. 82 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual: or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight, A Lay Sermon, Addressed to the Higher Classes of Society (1816), rpt in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, VI, Lay Sermons, ed. R.J. White (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) 36–7. I am grateful to Helen Small’s essay, “A Pulse of 124,” for this source. 83 Benhabib, Situating, 89–100. 84 Plotz, Crowd, 7. 85 Leanne Langley, “Music,” Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, eds J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. Van Arsdel (Aldershot: Scolar, 1994): 101, 123; Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 88. PMA later became the Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association. 86 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity, 1989) 182. 87 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1977), ed. G.H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 4–5. I follow Plotz in going to this source to define aesthetic versus nonaesthetic events. 88 See Robert Schumann, Schumann on Music: A selection from the writings, trans. and ed. Henry Pleasants (New York: Dover, 1988).



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89 Richard Wagner, “Une visite à Beethoven: épisode de la vie d’un musicien allemand,” Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris (19, 22, 29 November and 3 December 1840) and “Une soirée heureuse: Fantaisie sur la musique pittoresque,” Gazette Musicale (24 October and 7 November 1841). Translated and reprinted in Wagner, Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays, rpt of In Paris and Dresden, vol. 7 of Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, 1898; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) 21–45; 70–81. 90 I am indebted to a conversation with Meirion Hughes for this information. See Charles Reid, The Music Monster: A Biography of James William Davison, Music Critic of The Times of London, 1846–78 (London: Quartet, 1984) 97–9, 215–17. 91 Hughes, Watchmen, 14, 19. 92 Plotz, Crowd, 125. 93 For “the idea of music” see Alastair Williams, Constructing Musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) 3, 24, 32, 56. 94 For the idea of music as measuring a range of Victorian responses to sensibility, I would like to acknowledge a conversation with Jenny Bourne Taylor. 95 For instance, see Matthew Riley, “Rustling Reeds and Lofty Pines: Elgar and the Music of Nature,” 19th Century Music 26.2 (2002): 155–77. 96 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866), rpt in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962) 3: 341. Original emphasis. 97 Joseph Bennett, “The Influence of Handel on Music in England,” MT 18 (July 1877): 322. I am grateful to Brookes Kuykendall for this reference. 98 Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 109, 166. 99 R. Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” National Music and Other Essays, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1987) 183, cited by Jeremy Dibble in C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 284. For settings of Arnold’s poetry, see Oliver Neighbour, “The place of the Eighth among Vaughan Williams’s symphonies,” Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Alain Frogley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 216–20, 227n.

1


1 Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 245. 2 M.J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (Hassocks: Harvester, 1975) 12–13, 65, 69, 77. 3 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 9, 88–9; Cullen, Statistical Movement, 65, 135. 4 Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) 3. 5 Poovey, Making a Social Body, 89. 6 Ernest Albee, A History of English Utilitarianism (rpt of London: Sonnenschein, 1902; Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990) 179.



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7 F.R. Leavis, introduction, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge by J.S. Mill, ed. F.R. Leavis (1950; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 31–2; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto, 1958) 57. 8 Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (New York: St Martin’s – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) 4, 14–15. 9 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: Or Contemporary Portraits, 2nd edn. (London: Colburn, 1825) 10. 10 John Stuart Mill, “Bentham” (1838), Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, ed. F.R. Leavis (London: Chatto, 1968) 61. 11 Michael Levin, The Condition of England Question: Carlyle, Mill, Engels (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) 77. 12 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin, 1989) 61, 63. 13 Mill, Autobiography, 118. 14 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), eds Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 179. 15 Thomas Carlyle to J.S. Mill, 20 January 1834, Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart Mill, John Sterling and Robert Browning, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London: Unwin, 1923) 94. 16 John Whale, Imagination Under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 108. 17 Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, 19–20. Original emphasis. 18 Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, 19. 19 Mill, Autobiography, 62. 20 Imagination, in this sense, is seen in terms of its transcendent qualities. Whale, Imagination Under Pressure, 5. 21 Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, sensation narrative, and nineteenth-century psychology (London: Routledge, 1988) 31. 22 Moral management was a humanitarian system of treating the mentally ill which used the principle of non-restraint and was the foundation for psychological medicine in the nineteenth century. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) 227–30. 23 See Taylor and Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves, 228–9. 24 Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985) 188–200. 25 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854; London: Penguin, 1969) 55. Further page references appear in parentheses. 26 Cullen, Statistical Movement, 65–72; Poovey, Making a Social Body, 89. 27 Jeremy Bentham, Fragment on Government (1776), eds J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (Cambridge University Press, 1988) 114. 28 Whale, Imagination Under Pressure, 103. 29 Gallagher, Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 160. 30 Gallagher, Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 160–1. 31 Gallagher, Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 162. 32 Gallagher, Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 198. 33 Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (London: John and Hunt, 1825) 206.



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34 Bentham, Rationale of Reward, 207. 35 Benjamin Disraeli, Vindication of the English Constitution (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835) 11. 36 K.J. Fielding, “Benthamite Utilitarianism and Oliver Twist: A Novel of Ideas,” Dickens Quarterly 4 (1987): 59. 37 Helen Small, “A Pulse of 124: Charles Dickens and a pathology of the midVictorian reading public,” The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, eds James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 268. 38 David Barry, medical report, Factories Commission, 2nd report PP 1833, vol. XXI, A3, p. 53. Excerpt rpt in E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966) 66. 39 Shuttleworth and Taylor, Embodied Selves, 228; Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë, 4. 40 Jennifer L. Hall-Witt, “Representing the Audience in the Age of Reform: Critics and the Elite at the Italian Opera in London,” Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in honour of Cyril Ehrlich, eds Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 135–6. 41 William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (London: Croom Helm, 1975) 25–6. 42 Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë, 241. 43 Heather Glen, “Shirley and Villette,” The Cambridge Companion to The Brontës, ed. Heather Glen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 143, 144. 44 Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (1975), 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1988) 63; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) 404; Andrew D. Hook, “Charlotte Brontë, the Imagination, and Villette,” The Brontës: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Gregor (Eaglewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970) 145; Q.D. Leavis, introduction, Villette by Charlotte Brontë (New York: Harper Colophon, 1972) xxvi. 45 Mary Jacobus, “The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in Villette,” Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979) 47; Terry Lovell, “Gender and Englishness in Villette,” Political Gender: Texts and Contexts, eds Sally Ledger, Josephine McDonagh, and Jane Spencer (New York: Harvester, 1994) 49. 46 Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853; London: Penguin, 1979) 283. Further page references appear in parentheses. 47 Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of music, science and gender in the leisured home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 31–8. 48 Tony Tanner, introduction, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, ed. Mark Lilly (London: Penguin, 1979) 13. 49 Lovell, “Gender and Englishness,” 47–8. 50 Lovell, “Gender and Englishness,” 48. 51 James Parakilas, review of Listening in Paris in The Journal of Modern History 68.1 (1996): 194. 52 Christina Bashford, “Learning to Listen: Audiences for chamber music in early-Victorian London,” Journal of Victorian Culture 4 (1999): 27, 50; Hall-Witt, “Representing the Audience,” 121–44.



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53 William Weber, “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25 (1997): 681–3. 54 Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 3–4, 62. 55 Parakilas, review, 194. 56 Tanner, introduction, 34. 57 Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) 63. 58 Small, Love’s Madness, 155, 106. 59 Charlotte Brontë, letter to Margaret Wooler, 31 March 1848, in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857; London: Dent, 1908) 244. 60 Eagleton similarly suggests Dr John’s emotional shallowness because he speedily recovers from Ginevra. Eagleton, Myths of Power, 71. 61 Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, 424. The two authors identify Vashti as belonging to the Book of Esther, 1:1 to 2:18 (683 n21). 62 John Stokes, “Rachel’s ‘Terrible Beauty’: An Actress Moving Among the Novelists,” EHL 51.4 (1984): 771–93. 63 While it is not in the scope of my argument to investigate museums, Lucy’s travels through public spaces include a trip to a crowded museum, too. 64 Edgar Bèrillon, “Hypnotisme utile et hypnotisme dangereaux,” Revue de l’hypnotisme 3 (1888) 2. Cited in Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) 197. 65 Hook, “Charlotte Brontë,” 142. 66 Hook, “Charlotte Brontë,” 155. 67 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), ed. Alethea Hayter (London: Penguin, 1971) 78–9. 68 De Quincey, Confessions, 48. 69 John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 81–2. 70 Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë, 247. 71 F.R. Leavis, introduction, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, 1–38; Williams, Culture and Society, 49–70.

2


1 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: or The Two Nations (1845; London: Penguin, 1980) 228. Further page references appear in parentheses. 2 Jessie A. Middleton, introduction, Charles Auchester: A Memorial by Elizabeth Sara Sheppard (1853; London: Dent, 1911) vii–xii. 3 Benjamin Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography (London: Colburn, 1852) 492. 4 Charles Horsley was an English composer heavily influenced by Mendelssohn. Nicholas Temperley, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 2001) 11: 740; Eric Werner, Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and His Age (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963) 194. 5 Beginning in 1819, Zelter instructed Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn at the Berlin Singakademie. The school was oriented toward eighteenth-century



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6

7

8

9

10 11 12

Notes sacred choral music, especially Bach, just like the fictional Cecilia. R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 11, 44–6; the entry for Felix Mendelssohn by Todd, New Grove, 16: 390. However, while Sheppard represents Charles Auchester as a pupil of Aronach/Zelter, Charles Horsley did not study with Zelter but with German violinist and composer Moritz Hauptmann in Kassel. Starwood is represented as a gifted pianist living and studying with Seraphael, but William Sterndale Bennett was one of the foremost English composers of the day, while also being friends with Mendelssohn and Schumann. Temperley, New Grove, 2nd edn., 3: 281–6. Sigismund Thalberg was a showy display pianist whose compositions were generally considered second-rate. As the leader of the school of Cecilia before Seraphael, Milans-André practices a system “against Bach” (214). In the novel, the system of virtuoso playing is hilariously represented in Milans-André’s opera, Emancipation; or, the Modern Orpheus, in which the virtuoso violinist Niccolò Paganini plays the part of a “monstrous fiddle-player” (214). Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Konservatorium (1843), although Berlioz was not among the faculty, and neither Maria Malibran nor Charles Horsley were students. (Horsley’s Leipzig stay was from 1841 to 1843, after his education in Kassel.) Werner, Mendelssohn, 385–7. There was no actual romance between Mendelssohn and Malibran, but Werner acknowledges the composer’s enthusiastic admiration and probable flirtation with the singer during the height of her career in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Werner, Mendelssohn, 145–6, 238, 435. Sheppard appears to have fictionalized the difference in Mendelssohn’s and Berlioz’s musical styles as a romantic rivalry. For Mendelssohn’s and Berlioz’s different styles, see Werner, Mendelssohn, 170, 503, 514. While Mendelssohn was married to Cécile Jeanrenaud, his relationship with Jenny Lind was commonly perceived to be mutually admiring, deeply empathetic, and having romantic potential, although it was never consummated. Mendelssohn wrote the soprano part of Elijah for Jenny Lind, who performed it in London after the composer’s death (1848). Werner, Mendelssohn, 435–7, 444–5, 475. The Critic. Cited by the publishers, Black & Hurst, in an advertisement for Charles Auchester in The Athenæum (October 8, 1853) 1182. Britannia. Cited by the publishers, Black & Hurst, in an advertisement for Charles Auchester in The Athenæum (October 1, 1853) 1171. The title literally means “The Return from Abroad,” but Chorley translated it into English in 1850 as Son and Stranger. I am grateful to Clive Brown for this reference and for suggesting that if Sheppard was aware of the private performance of Mendelssohn’s operetta before it was published posthumously in 1850, then the novel shows just how much knowledge was available in London non-professional musical circles about Mendelssohn’s private life. Of course, as Charles Auchester was not published until 1853 and the performance of the fairy operetta does not occur until late in the book, it may be that Sheppard learned about the private performance of Heimkehr aus der Fremde from Chorley’s preface to the published edition of 1850 and simply included it in her novel at that late date. She did not revise the novel, so it could not have been added retrospectively. For the revision process, see Harriet E. Prescott, “Elizabeth Sara Sheppard,” Atlantic Monthly 10 (October 1862): 499.



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13 Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Charles Auchester: A Memorial (1853; London: Dent, 1911) 261. Further page references appear in parentheses. 14 For Mendelssohn’s England visit, the Liederspiel, and the Birmingham Festival, see Todd, Mendelssohn, 203–22, 357–8; Todd, New Grove, 16: 389–424. 15 Henry Chorley, review of Charles Auchester, The Athenæum (12 November 1853) 1352. For Chorley’s friendship with Mendelssohn, see Robert Terrell Bledsoe, Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) 92–111. 16 Shaw, The Star (23 February 1889). Cited in Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 5. 17 For discussions of inaccurate portraits of Charles and Sophy Horsley in the novel, see Rosamund Brunel Gotch, “Prologue,” Mendelssohn and his Friends in Kensington: Letters from Fanny and Sophy Horsley written 1833–36 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) 5. 18 Jennifer L. Hall-Witt, “Representing the Audience in the Age of Reform: Critics and the Elite at the Italian Opera in London, Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in honour of Cyril Ehrlich, eds Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 137. Hall-Witt derives her idea of “event” from Carl Dahlhous, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 9; Lydia Goehr, Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An essay in the philosophy of music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 100–01, 113, 118, 121, 222. 19 Court Journal (8 May 1830) n.p. Cited in Hall-Witt, “Representing the Audience,” 140. 20 Hall-Witt, “Representing the Audience,” 137–41. 21 Hall-Witt, “Representing the Audience,” 127, 130. 22 Christina Bashford, “John Ella and the Making of the Musical Union,” Music and British Culture, 1785–1914, eds Bashford and Langley, 194. 23 Sophie Fuller, “ ‘Cribbed, cabin’d, and confined’: Female musical creativity in Victorian fiction,” The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, eds Nicky Losseff and Sophie Fuller (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 28–30. 24 Ian Graham-Jones, “Alice Mary Smith: A Forgotten Victorian Symphonist,” 4th Biennial International Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, University of Leeds, UK, 25 July 2003. 25 William Leonhard Gage, editor’s preface, Life of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy by Wilhelm Adolf Lampadius, ed. and trans. William Leonhard Gage (London: William Reeves, 1876) vi. 26 Wilhelm Adolf Lampadius, Life of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, ed. and trans. William Leonhard Gage (London: William Reeves, 1876) 132. 27 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto, 1958) 56–65, 326–7. For music and utilitarian reform, see Gordon Cox, A History of Music Education in England 1872–1928 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1993) 9–11. 28 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995) 205. 29 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200. 30 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 205. 31 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 309–20. 32 Louis Spohr, Autobiography (London: Longman, 1865) 2: 82.



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33 [John Ella], Morning Post (27 May 1829). Cited in Adam Carse, The Orchestra from Beethoven to Berlioz: A history of the orchestra in the first half of the 19th century, and of the development of orchestral baton-conducting (Cambridge: Heffer, 1948) 300. Original emphasis. 34 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 173. 35 The gaze and the baton were also crucial to systems of teaching sight-singing around the same time. See J.S. Curwen, The Story of Tonic Sol-fa, 10th edn. (London: J. Curwen and Sons, [1891] ) 2. 36 Sebastian Hensel, The Mendelssohn Family (1729–1847): From Letters and Journals, trans. Carl Klingemann, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Sampson Low, 1881) 2: 161. 37 Lampadius, Life of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, 155. 38 Elliott W. Galkin, A History of Orchestral Conducting: In theory and practice (Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon, 1988) 283, 310. 39 Hector Berlioz, A Treatise upon Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, trans. Mary Cowden Clarke, 2nd edn. (London: Novello, 1858) 245. 40 John Vincent, Disraeli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) 90. 41 Benjamin Disraeli, “What is He? by the Author of ‘Vivian Grey’ ” (1833) in Lord Beaconsfield on the Constitution (London: Field and Tuer, 1884) 15. 42 Vincent, Disraeli, 84. 43 Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) 228. 44 “L’orgue politique,” Journal de Rouen (le 28 pluviose an IV in the French revolutionary calendar) n.p. Cited by Ingrid Sykes, “Acoustique, physique, dynamique: Instrument Design and the Acoustical Technology of Science and Industry in 19th-Century France,” Twelfth Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, University of Leeds, UK, 5 July 2002. See also a discussion of this article in Michelle Biget, Musique et Révolution Française (Paris: Annales Littéraires de l’Université de Besançon, Diffusion de Belles Lettres, 1989) 221. Ingrid Sykes kindly provided these sources and talked further with me after the conference. 45 Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872) in Erewhon; Erewhon Revisited (London: Dent, 1932) 26. Further page references appear in parentheses. 46 For more on utopian communities in the nineteenth century and their critique of capitalist exploitation, see A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1952) 114–48. 47 While the narrator remains nameless in Erewhon, he is called George Higgs in the sequel, Butler’s Erewhon Revisited (1901). 48 Morton, English Utopia, 144. See also Sue Zemka, “Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism,” ELH 69.2 (Summer 2002): 469; Simon Dentith, “Imagination and Inversion in Nineteenth-Century Utopian Writing,” Anticipations: Essays in Early Science Fiction and its Precursors, ed. David Seed (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995) 139. 49 Zemka, “Erewhon,” 439. 50 Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 158. 51 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; London: Vintage, 1994) xii, xiii. Original emphasis. 52 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xii. 53 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xii.



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54 Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 157. 55 Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 159, 167. 56 Samuel Butler, review of “Performance of Israel in Egypt at Exeter Hall,” The Drawing Room Gazette (2 December 1871), rpt in Michael Allis, “Samuel Butler and Handel; A Study of Obsession,” Händel-Jahrbuch 44 (1998): 269. 57 Alexander Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 19th-Century Music 26.1 (Summer 2002): 52. 58 Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 53. 59 Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 56. “Apotheosis” was the term used to describe this effect from the first. See Hector Berlioz, “The Musical Celebration at Bonn,” Second Epilogue in Evenings with the Orchestra, ed. and trans. Jacques Barzun (1852; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 340, originally published in the Journal des Débats (22 August and 3 September 1845). There were also eighteenth-century monuments to Handel in England (in Vauxhall Gardens and Westminster Abbey), but the enormous size of the Erewhonian statues makes them more aptly compared with nineteenth-century monuments, such as the Bonn Beethoven Monument. For the Handel statues, see Suzanne Aspden, “ ‘Fam’d Handel Breathing, tho’ Transformed to Stone’: The Composer as Monument,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55.1 (Spring 2002): 39–90. My thanks to Anna Celenza for mentioning Rehding’s article to me. 60 Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 56. 61 Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 56. 62 Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 58–61. 63 Robert Schumann, “Monument für Beethoven: Vier kritische Stimmen Hierüber,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 4 (1836): 212. Cited in Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 60. Rehding’s translation. 64 Anna Celenza helpfully shared this information with me. See Manuela Jahrmäker, Ossian: Eine Figur und eine Idee des europäischen Musiktheaters um 1800 (Cologne, 1993). 65 Jennifer Davis Michael, “Ocean Meets Ossian: Staffa as Romantic Symbol,” Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Local/Global, an Interdisciplinary NineteenthCentury Studies Conference (INCS), University of Notre Dame London Centre, UK, 12 July 2003. My thanks to the author for allowing me to reference her paper. See J.M.W. Turner, Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1832; Yale Center for British Art); John Keats to his brother Tom, July 1818, Letters of John Keats 1814 –1821, ed. Hayder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958) 1: 348–50; Wordsworth’s four sonnets on Staffa in the series Poems Composed or Suggested During a Tour, in the Summer of 1833. 1833 is the year after Mendelssohn’s Overture, “The Hebrides or Fingal’s Cave,” Op. 26, premiered in London. 66 Wordsworth, “Cave of Staffa” poems XXVIII, 13; XXIX, 3. 67 The Aeolian harp, a frame containing different lengths of strings strummed by the random breeze, represents divine inspiration filling the poet, who is analogous to the instrument. The caves were an acoustically resonant space filled by the sound of wind and waves, which Wordsworth suggests are inspiring to the observing poet: the poet “might stand / Gazing and take into his mind and heart, / With undistracted reverence, the effect” (XXVIII, 9–11). 68 For Handel’s perceived Englishness, see Allis, “Samuel Butler and Handel,” 235; Aspden, “Fam’d Handel Breathing,” 39–90.



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69 Katharine Ellis, “The criticism,” The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 158. Gazette musicale later became Revue et gazette musicale. 70 Jacques Barzun, introduction, Evenings with the Orchestra, xvii–xviii. 71 Middleton, introduction, vii. 72 Hector Berlioz, Evenings with the Orchestra, ed. and trans. Jacques Barzun (1852; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 269. Further page references appear in parentheses. 73 Winter, Mesmerized, 317. 74 Joël-Marie Fauquet cites Berlioz’s Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (Paris, 1843) in his “The Grand Traité d’instrumentation,” trans. Peter Bloom, The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 167. Berlioz’s concept of orchestration stresses not only the large proportions of the ideal orchestra, but also community. The idea of unity is also familiar to German composition techniques, as Carl Maria von Weber declares: “By opera I understand, of course, the opera which the German desires – an art work complete in itself, in which the partial contributions of the related and collaborating arts blend together, disappear, and, in disappearing, somehow form a new world.” Carl Maria von Weber, “On the Opera Undine,” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung XIX (1817): 201–08. Rpt in Olive Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History: From Classical Antiquity through the Romantic Era (New York: Norton, 1950) 803. My thanks to Conrad Donakowski for observing the similarities between Weber’s ideas and Charles Auchester’s notions of community as depicted in the German conservatory. 75 The composers are arguably two halves of a whole. Xilef and Shetland can be seen as compositely referring to Felix Mendelssohn. Although Xilef’s character seems more like Berlioz’s than Mendelssohn’s, some reference to Mendelssohn is implied because of the name (Xilef is “felix” spelled backwards). “Shetland” also brings to mind Mendelssohn’s association with Scotland. Moreover, Mendelssohn was directing the musical life in Leipzig from 1835 to 1827, and Berlioz complimented it as a musical city “rich in instrumentalists” and with an extremely well-disciplined orchestra. Berlioz, Memoirs, 299, 300. The comparison might especially be sustained because Mendelssohn established the Leipzig Konservatorium in 1843, the same year in which Berlioz visited Mendelssohn in Leipzig. Berlioz’s story about Euphonia, “a true conservatory” (269), was published a year later. The February visit to Leipzig was the first contact the two composers had had since their initial meeting in Rome in 1831. For details about the Rome and Leipzig visits, see Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (1865), trans. and ed. David Cairns, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Dent, 2002) 293–304. Berlioz does not mention the Konservatorium in his Memoirs, but he must have been aware of it, especially as it was being advertised as early as January 1843. Todd, New Grove, 16: 400; Todd, Mendelssohn, 448. 76 Hugh Macdonald, New Grove, 2nd edn., 3: 398. 77 Katherine Kolb, “The Short Stories,” The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 150. 78 Bacon is the violist; Dimsky, first double bass; Winter, second bassoon; Dervinck, first oboe; Turuth, second flute. While perhaps not organized around opera orchestras, famous literary and musical discussion groups flourished in



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1 Mervyn Jones, The Amazing Victorian: A Life of George Meredith (London: Constable, 1999) 110–11; J.S. Stone, George Meredith’s Politics: As Seen in His Life, Friendships, and Works (Port Credit, Ontario: Meany, 1986) 29–40. For the original names of the novels, see Meredith’s letters to Messrs Harper and Brothers, [?October–November 1863], Mrs Janet Ross, 1 December 1863, and W. Stanley Withers, 3 April 1886, The Letters of George Meredith, ed. C.L. Cline, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) 1: 234, 236; 2: 809. 2 Lionel Stevenson, The Ordeal of George Meredith (London: Peter Owen, n.d.) 158; Ioan Williams, “Emilia in England and Italy,” Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1971) 144. 3 Gillian Beer, Meredith: A Change of Masks; A Study of the Novels (London: Athlone, 1970) 36. 4 Lionel Stevenson’s awareness of Vittoria as a “psychology of revolution” (Ordeal, 160) has often been cited by scholars. For example, see David Donald Stone, Novelists in a Changing World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1972) 108; J.S. Stone, Meredith’s Politics, 40. 5 J.S. Stone, Meredith’s Politics, 40. 6 Ioan Williams discusses Sandra Belloni in Darwinian terms and sees Meredith’s view in Vittoria as “the emergence of the Italian nation in terms of mankind’s continuing evolution towards a higher nature.” Williams, “Emilia,” 163 n6, 156. While there are obvious similarities with my argument, I go into greater detail about Victorian mental physiology, its link to bodily action, and its perceived connection to nation-building. 7 G.H. Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, vol. 2 (London: Blackwood, 1859–1860). 8 J.S. Stone, Meredith’s Politics, 2. 9 George Meredith, Sandra Belloni, originally Emilia in England (1864; London: Constable, 1909) 389–90. Original emphasis. Further page references appear in parentheses. 10 Gillian Beer’s discussion of Meredith’s narrative techniques has some similarity to my consideration of the connections made between mind and body in nineteenth-century science (Beer, Meredith, 3, 43–4). 11 See Herbert Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857), Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Longman, 1858) 359–84; G.H. Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 2: 58–60; Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 12 Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 13. 13 Another interesting depiction of a woman sponsoring a talented, workingclass singer for her own social success is found in Margaret Oliphant’s Miss



nineteenth-century Europe, such as Leipzig’s musical/literary society, Tunnel über der Pleisse. 79 Kolb, “Short Stories,” 156.

14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35

Notes Majoribanks (1866), a novel published two years after Sandra Belloni. The Piersons in Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere attempt to use Rose similarly. For Meredith’s concerns regarding the novel’s climax as being about character rather than marriage, see Meredith to Augustus Jessopp, c.16 March 1864, in Letters, ed. Cline, 1: 249. Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and nation in English radical politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 1–2, 61–5. Harry Hearder, Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento 1790–1870 (London: Longman, 1983) 219–35. Also see J.S. Stone, Meredith’s Politics, 10. Hearder, Italy, 190–1, 211. Finn, After Chartism, 188–9. See also Derek Beales, “Garibaldi in England: The politics of Italian enthusiasm,” Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento, eds John A. Davis and Paul Ginsborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 209–12. Finn, After Chartism, 218–25. Andrew Thompson, George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento (London: Macmillan, 1998) 6–7. Tom Winnifrith, “Renaissance and Risorgimento in Romola,” George Eliot and Europe, ed. John Rignall (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997) 166–78; Thompson, George Eliot and Italy, 68–83. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860; London: Penguin, 1974) 595. Allan C. Christensen, A European Version of Victorian Fiction: The Novels of Giovanni Ruffini (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996). I am grateful to Derek Scott for mentioning Doctor Antonio to me. Enzo Bottasso, “Successo e significato d’un romanzo ottocentesco: Il dottor Antonio,” Accademie e biblioteche d’Italia LIII (1985): 83. Cited in Christensen, European Version, 67. Meredith to the Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco, April 15, 1902, in Letters, ed. Cline, 3: 1436. J.S. Stone, Meredith’s Politics, 3, 12–13. J.S. Stone, Meredith’s Politics, 44–5. Anna Harwell Celenza, Hans Christian Andersen and Music: The Nightingale Revealed (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) 49, 96. Hans Christian Andersen, H.C. Andersens Dagbøger 1825–75, Kåre Olsen and H. Topsøe-Jensen, eds, 12 vols (Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab/G.E.C. Gad, 1971–1976) (8 December 1833) 1: 247–8. Cited in Celenza, Andersen, 49. Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy (1807), trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 33. Further page references appear in parentheses. Kari E. Lokke, Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, history and transcendence (London: Routledge, 2004) 13. Kari E. Lokke, “ ‘Children of Liberty’: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand,” PMLA 118.3 (May 2003): 508–09. Walter Scott, Waverley (1814), ed. Andrew Hook (London: Penguin, 1972) 175. Further page references appear in parentheses. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806), ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 52. Further page references appear in parentheses. Charles Robert Maturin, The Milesian Chief: A Romance, 4 vols (London: Colburn, 1812) 1: 23. Further page references appear in parentheses.



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36 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) 75. 37 The national tale is a genre developed in Ireland in the first decade of the nineteenth century, dealing with the influence on characters of place rather than historical events. Katie Trumpener considers The Wild Irish Girl and The Milesan Chief to be national tales in her book, Bardic Nationalism (128–57). 38 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, xii. 39 Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 81. 40 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) 58. 41 J.S. Stone, Meredith’s Politics, 34. 42 See Anon., “The Boot: From the Italian of Giuseppe Giusti,” Macmillan’s 2 (July 1860): 244–8. 43 George Meredith, The Egoist (1879), ed. Margaret Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 10. Original emphasis. Further page references appear in parentheses. 44 For audience riots, see Anon., “Audience behavior at Sims Reeves’s ballad concert, Oxford,” Musical Times 13 (January 1869): 639 [hereafter MT]; Anon., “Sims Reeves, the encore nuisance and audience behaviour at a ballad concert in Liverpool,” MT 17 (July 1875): 137; Jennifer L. Hall-Witt, “Representing the Audience in the Age of Reform: Critics and the Elite at the Italian Opera in London, Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in honour of Cyril Ehrlich, eds Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 136, 141; Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987) 30; Clifford Bevan, “Brass Band Contests: Art or Sport?”, Bands: The Brass Band Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Trevor Herbert, Popular Music in Britain Series (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991) 117; Jennifer L. Hall, “The Re-fashioning of Fashionable Society: Opera-going and Sociability in Britain, 1821–1861,” PhD diss, Yale University, 1996, 246–54, 345–51. 45 John Ella, Record of the Musical Union, 3rd Series, no. 1 (23 March 1846): 1. 46 Christina Bashford, “Not Just ‘G.’: Towards a History of the Programme Note,” George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, ed. Michael Musgrave (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 119–20; G.B. Shaw, “Bach and Don Pasquale,” The Hornet (18 April 1877), rpt in Shaw’s Music (The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw), ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Reinhardt, The Bodley Head, 1981) 1: 113. 47 Anon., “English Audiences,” MT 26 (1 September 1885): 527. 48 Trilby does not incite violence, but her performance is described in the discourse of crowd psychology. See Phyllis Weliver, “Music, crowd control and the female performer in Trilby,” The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, eds Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 57–80. 49 A conversation with Charles McGuire suggested the parenthetical comment. 50 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages in which Something is said about Melody and Musical Imitation” (1781), The First and Second Discourses and Essay on the Origin of Languages, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper, 1986) 245–7. 51 Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin,” First and Second Discourses, ed. Gourevitch, 276.



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52 Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) 281. There is debate regarding when the Essai was composed, with general agreement that it must have been begun in 1755 at the earliest and finished around 1761. Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 84. 53 Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language, 85. 54 Cranston, Jean-Jacques, 281; John T. Scott, introduction, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. John T. Scott, The Collected Writings of Rousseau (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1998) 7: xix. As Scott describes, the Quarrel of the Bouffons originated in August 1752 with a Paris production of Pergolesi’s La Serva padrona given by an Italian opera troupe. Its success, and that of subsequent, equally successful Italian operas, alarmed advocates of French music. Rousseau’s Letter to Grimm on the Subject of the Remarks Added to His Letter on “Omphale” (April 1752) marked his entry into the debate and was followed by Letter from a Symphonist, Letter on French Music and his opera Le Devin du village. Scott, introduction, 7: xix–xxiii. 55 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter on French Music in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. John T. Scott, Collected Writings of Rousseau, 7: 145. 56 See Denise Launay, ed., La Querelle des Bouffons, 3 vols (Paris: 1973) 1: 689. Cited by Cranston, Jean-Jacques, 281–2. 57 Grassineau’s Musical Dictionary with an appendix from the dictionnaire de Musique of M. Rousseau [trans. by James Grassineau from the French of S. de Broosard] (London: Robson, 1769) 27. 58 John T. Scott, Collected Writings of Rousseau, 7: xxiv. 59 John T. Scott, Collected Writings of Rousseau, 7: xxiv. 60 Roberto M. Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) 85–9. 61 Dainotto, Place, 84. See Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855). 62 Stephen Banfield, “Aesthetics and Criticism,” The Romantic Age: 1800–1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley (London: Athlone, 1981) 455–9. Ideas of climate as related to musical style were also developed in the course of the century. See Henry Fothergill Chorley, The National Music of the World (London: Sampson Low, 1880) 15–16, 77–87, 125, 176. Bennett Zon helpfully suggested the latter source to me. 63 Spencer, “Origin,” 368, 369, 371. 64 Spencer, “Origin,” 381. 65 Spencer, “Origin,” 382. Original emphasis. 66 Spencer, “Origin,” 384. 67 Similarly, Rousseau uses the example of a Tarantula bite to demonstrate that the cure depends on the victim being acquainted with the tunes and words of his or her own nation. Rousseau, Essai, 283–4. 68 Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (1988; London: Virago, 1989) 9. 69 Meredith to Augustus Jessopp, c.16 March 1864, in Letters, ed. Cline, 1: 249. 70 Unpublished note by Meredith from the 1880s, cited by Beer in Meredith, 182.



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1 For Sandra Belloni as topical, see Lionel Stevenson, The Ordeal of George Meredith (London: Peter Owen, n.d.) 131–2. 2 Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 36. 3 George Meredith, Vittoria (1867), rev. edn. (Westminster: Constable, 1897) 10. Further page references appear in parentheses. 4 Roger Parker, “The Opera Industry,” The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (2001; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 90; Roger Parker, “Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati”: The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s (Parma, Italy: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1997). For the traditional view of Verdi’s 1840s operas, see David R.B. Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 1. 5 Parker, Arpa, 94. 6 Roger Parker, Verdi and His Operas, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2000) 18–19; Parker, Arpa. 7 For grand opera, see Parker, “Opera Industry,” 107–08. 8 Entry for “Verdi” by Roger Parker, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 2001) 26: 454; Parker, Verdi, 27; Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin, introduction, The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, eds Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 1. Recent scholarship has furthered Parker’s idea that the association between Verdi and patriotism represents a retrospective labeling, using the origin of the acrostic V.E.R.D.I. as a way of locating the precise moment in 1859 when patriotic reception of Verdian opera began in Italy. See Birgit Pauls, Giuseppe Verdi und das Risorgimento (Berlin: Akademi Verlag, 1996); Michael Sawall, “ ‘VIVA V.E.R.D.I.’: Origine e ricenzione di un simbolo nazionale nell’anno 1859,” Verdi 2001, eds Fabrizio della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, and Marco Marica (Florence: Olschki, 2003) 1: 123–31. 9 Entry for “Verdi” by Parker, New Grove, 26: 446. 10 Parker, Arpa, 27. 11 John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The role of the impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 165–7. 12 Harry Hearder, Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento 1790–1870 (London: Longman, 1983) 249; Derek Beales, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (London: Allen and Erwin, 1971) 46. 13 Beales, Risorgimento, 46. 14 Rosselli, Opera, 165. 15 As Parker documents, the biography is Arthur Pidgin’s Giuseppe Verdi: Vita aneddotica (Milano, 1881). Parker, Arpa, 20–1.



71 Meredith to Frederick A. Maxse, [?28 December 1865], in Letters, ed. Cline, 1: 323. 72 Meredith to Algernon C. Swinburne, 2 March 1867, in Letters, ed. Cline, 1: 354.

Notes

16 For the movement from sophisticated thought and plot in eighteenthcentury Italian opera to growing emphasis on melodic set numbers in the early nineteenth century, see Kimbell, Verdi, 65–70. 17 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867; London: Fontana, 1993) 86. 18 Bagehot, English Constitution, 82. 19 M.W. Taylor, Men versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 115–31. 20 Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857) in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Longman, 1858) 1–54. First published in The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review ns 11 (1 April 1857): 445–85. 21 For Meredith and the Westminster Review, see Gordon S. Haight, “George Meredith and the ‘Westminster Review’,” The Modern Language Review 53.1 ( January 1958): 1–16; J.S. Stone, George Meredith’s Politics: As Seen in His Life, Friendships, and Works (Port Credit, Ontario: Meany, 1986) 20. 22 Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London: Parker, 1859) 3: 3, 36. 23 Dellamora and Fischlin, Work of Opera, 2. 24 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 12. 25 McClary, Feminine Endings, 8. 26 For a general history of post-1848 Italian opera and Verdi’s break with earlier traditions, where musical structure did not necessarily match subject matter, see John Rosselli, “Italy: the Decline of a Tradition,” The Late Romantic Era, ed. Jim Samson (London: Macmillan, 1991) 126–35. 27 For Rigoletto (1851) and Il Trovatore (1853) as mid-century representations of “a Janus-faced perspective of Italian opera,” see Thomas Grey, “Opera and music drama,” The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (2001; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 377. 28 For orchestral thought and its influence on opera, see Parker, “Opera Industry,” 103, 106. 29 Of course, Verdi participated in a more Europe-wide movement to fuse dramatic story with realistic music. See Rosselli, “Italy,” 134–5; Parker, “Opera Industry,” 105–06; Grey, “Opera and music drama,” 377–9. 30 Kimbell, Verdi, 68. 31 Hilary Poriss, “A Madwoman’s Choice: Aria substitution in Lucia di Lammermoor,” Cambridge Opera Journal 13.1 (2001): 21–2; Hilary Poriss, “Verdi meets Bellini: I Lombardi in Beatrice di Tenda’s Castle,” Verdi 2001, eds della Seta, Marvin, and Marica, 1: 74–6. 32 Poriss, “Verdi meets Bellini,” 1: 69. 33 Verdi to Giovanni Ricordi, 20 May 1847, I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, eds G. Cesari and A. Luzio (Milan, 1913) 37–9. Cited and translated in Roger Parker, Studies in Early Verdi 1832–1844 (New York: Garland, 1989) 145, 166 n4. 34 [Meredith], “Belles Lettres and Art,” Westminster Review ns 12 (1 July 1857): 306. 35 [Meredith], “Belles Lettres and Art,” Westminster Review ns 11 (April 1857): 602, 603. See also J.S. Stone, Meredith’s Politics, 21–2; Meredith to Augustus Jessup, 13 November 1861, in The Letters of George Meredith, ed. C.L. Cline (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) 1: 110. 36 See [Meredith], “Belles Lettres and Art,” Westminster Review ns 12 (1 July 1857): 307. 37 J.S. Stone, Meredith’s Politics, 22.



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38 Meredith to Augustus Jessup, 13 November 1861, in Letters, ed. Cline, 1: 110; Meredith, “Belles Letters and Art,” Westminster Review, April 1857 to January 1858. 39 Beer, Meredith, 1. 40 Beer, Meredith, 185. 41 See Henry Fothergill Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 2 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862). 42 I have primarily examined The Cornhill Magazine, which published articles, poetry and novels associated with the Risorgimento, such as George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863). Meredith originally hoped to serialize Vittoria in the Cornhill. See Meredith to William Hardman, May 29, 1864, Letters, ed. Cline, 1: 257. 43 Beer, Meredith, 187. 44 Ioan Williams, “Emilia in England and Italy,” Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1971) 162. 45 Meredith to Frederick A. Maxse, [?8 December 1865], Letters, ed. Cline, 1: 320.

5


1 G.B. Shaw, “A Reminiscence of Hector Berlioz,” 1880. Unpublished short story, Papers of George Bernard Shaw, add. ms. 50693 (ff. 293) 1879–1901. Shaw’s pages 11–12. Pages 57–8 of the folio. The British Library, London. Consulted 18 July 2003. Original emphasis. 2 Shaw, “Reminiscence,” Shaw’s page 2. Page 48 of the folio. 3 Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (1865), trans. and ed. David Cairns, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Dent, 2002) 120. 4 Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition (London: Chatto, 1997) 136–7. 5 Richard Farr Dietrich, Bernard Shaw’s Novels: Portraits of the Artist as Man and Superman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996) xiii, 4–5; G.B. Shaw, Collected Letters 1874–1897, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Reinhardt, 1965) 48. 6 Sally Peters, “Shaw’s Life: A Feminist in Spite of Himself,” The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, ed. Christopher Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 7; Dan H. Laurence, introduction, Shaw’s Music (The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw), ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Reinhardt, The Bodley Head, 1981) 1: 13–17. 7 Between 1877 and 1888 Shaw did continue to contribute music criticism to journals such as the Dramatic Review, Our Corner, and the Magazine of Music. See editor’s note to Shaw’s letter to Edwin Paget Palmer, 26 February 1885, Collected Letters, ed. Laurence, 118. However, this criticism is not as well known as the period from 1888 to 1894, or even 1876–1877. 8 See William Irvine, “Bernard Shaw’s Early Novels,” The Trollopian 2.1 (1947): 34; Dietrich, Shaw’s Novels, 117–19. 9 Peters, “Shaw’s Life,” 8; Irvine, “Shaw’s Early Novels,” 37–8. 10 Irvine, “Shaw’s Early Novels,” 31. 11 Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 (London: Macmillan, 2000) 43, 46–7, 50–1. For more on the riot, Gillett cites Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1918) 1: 142–3.



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12 George Bernard Shaw, The Irrational Knot (1880; London: Constable, 1950) 10. Further page references appear in parentheses. 13 Guide-books are necessary for deciphering the monument’s references to the Great Exhibition of 1851, Prince Albert’s support of the arts, and the national contribution to the ornate shrine, which cost £90,000. J. W., The Penny Guide to the Albert Memorial (London: Arnold, 1872) 8. See also Handbook to the Prince Consort National Memorial, published by Authority of the Executive Committee, new edn. (London: Murray, 1874); Proposed National Memorial to His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (n.p.: Singer, 1862) BL Shelfmark 10805 c22. 14 G.B. Shaw, Love among the Artists (1881; London: Constable, 1932) 8. Original emphasis. Further page references appear in parentheses. 15 G.B. Shaw, “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s Works of Fiction. Reviewed by Himself,” The Novel Review n.s. 33 (February 1892): 234. 16 Dan H. Laurence, editor’s note for Shaw’s letter to Richard Bentley & Son (18 February 1882), Collected Letters, ed. Laurence, 48. 17 Richard Dietrich also makes this connection, but does not expand upon it beyond a single sentence (Shaw’s Novels, 116). 18 Michael Allis, “Musical Reactions to Tennyson: Reformulating Musical Imagery in ‘The Lotos-Eaters’,” The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Phyllis Weliver (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) 143–4; Jeremy Dibble, “Parry as Historiographer,” Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, ed. Bennett Zon, vol.1 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) 38–41. 19 C. Hubert H. Parry, Studies of Great Composers (London: Routledge, 1887) 156. 20 Chapter 1, “Renaissance and reformation (1840–94),” Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd edn. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) 3–51; Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 3. 21 Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England (1907), 3rd edn. rev. by J.A. Westrup (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952) 331; Edward Elgar’s inaugural lecture for the position of Peyton Professor of Music at Birmingham University (16 March 1905) 2, rpt in Edward Elgar, A Future for English Music and Other Lectures, ed. Percy M. Young (London: Dobson, 1968) 23; J.A. Fuller Maitland, English Music of the Nineteenth Century (London: Grant Richards, 1902) 188, 199; Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 193. 22 Michael Allis, Parry’s Creative Process (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 6. 23 Allis, Parry’s, 6 n20. 24 For Shaw’s repeated parodies of program notes, which he found useless, see Jacques Barzun, “Shaw versus Stendhal,” Partisan Review 51.4/52.5 (1984– 1985): 616. 25 G.B. Shaw, preface (1935) to London Music in 1888–89 as Heard by Corno di Bassetto (Later Known as Bernard Shaw) with Some Further Autobiographical Particulars, G.B. Shaw (London: Constable, 1937) 21–2. 26 For the Concerts of Ancient Music, see Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 7; William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (London: Croom Helm, 1975) 53, 61–6. 27 Weber, Music, 62. 28 Beginning in 1871, “Professor John Ella” or, more usually, “Professor Ella,” is how Ella’s name appears on the cover of his Annual Record of the Musical Union.



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34

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36

37

38 39 40 41

42

I am indebted to a conversation with Christina Bashford for information on London music societies and, especially, John Ella. See Christina Bashford, “John Ella and the Making of the Musical Union,” Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in honour of Cyril Ehrlich, eds Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 193–214. Bashford, “John Ella,” 205. For the conservativeness of the Musical Times as Novello’s house journal, see Hughes and Stradling, English Musical Renaissance, 40; for the role of the press in the national music project, see Hughes, Watchmen, 1. David Donald Stone, Novelists in a Changing World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1972) 1–24. For Lasserre, see Ella, “To the Members of the Musical Union” (19 December 1880), Thirty-Sixth Annual Record of the Musical Union (1880) iv. For Parry’s piece, see Thirty-Seventh Annual Record of the Musical Union (1881) 5–8, 12. Parry, as the prototypical progressive composer, is further substantiated by Owen Jack’s being thirty-four years old during his first Antient Orpheus commission, which is very close to Parry’s age of thirty-three in 1881. My thanks to Michael Allis for noticing the similarity of ages. For the Philharmonic Society, see Cyril Ehrlich, First Philharmonic: A history of the Royal Philharmonic Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 8–14, 31–2, 248–66. The Musical Union programmed only chamber music. See Fuller Maitland, English Music, 201; Hughes, Watchmen, 24, 37; Hughes and Stradling, English Musical Renaissance, 219; E.D. Mackerness, “George Bernard Shaw and the English Musical Renaissance,” Durham University Journal 79.2 (1987): 303. Shaw, “The Bach Bicentenary,” The Dramatic Review (28 March 1885); Shaw, “The Most Utter Failure Ever Achieved,” The World (3 May 1893). Both rpt in Shaw’s Music, 1: 219–24, 2: 869–76. My thanks to Jeremy Dibble for this information. See also Shaw’s letter to Edwin Paget Palmer on 26 February 1885, Collected Letters, 118–19. Shaw began the novel on 19 May 1881 and finished it on 10 January 1882. These dates are found in the Papers of George Bernard Shaw held by The British Library, London. See the page for 1881 in “autobiographical notes, etc., 1877–1889,” add. ms. 50510A (ff. i ⫹ 26), n.d. and Plan 3 Love among the Artists in “Draft poems, articles, letters, synopses of novels, printed leaflets, notes on music, shorthand exercises, etc.; 1877–1884, n.d.,” add. ms. 50721A, B (ff. 123, 68). For the success of the Cambridge performance and the Novello publication date, see Dibble, Parry, 196, 511. G.B. Shaw, “Most Utter Failure Ever Achieved,” rpt in Shaw’s Music, 2: 873. Dibble, Parry, 188, 194. Hughes, Watchmen, 139–42; Dibble, Parry, 186–7, 194–5. Phipson’s description of Jack’s Prometheus Unbound is of “four scenes with chorus, a dialogue of Prometheus with the earth, an antiphony of the earth and moon, an overture, [ . . . ] a race of the hours” (205), a dialogue between Asia and Panthea, and half-hour overture, while Parry’s setting includes three scenes with chorus, a monologue by Prometheus, solo by Jupiter, dialogue between Prometheus and Mercury, Spirit of the Hour solo, song for The Earth, various choruses, and a 45-bar prelude. Dibble, Parry, 186.



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43 G.B. Shaw, preface to the first German edition (1907), The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring (1898; New York: Bretano, 1909) xvii. 44 Shaw, Perfect Wagnerite, 73. 45 Because I am referring to Shaw, I am using his anglicized spellings of the character’s names. It is, of course, more usual to use the German spellings. 46 Shaw, Perfect Wagnerite, 28–9, 98–9. 47 Hughes and Stradling, English Musical Renaissance, 220–1. 48 Miriam Allott, “Attitudes to Shelley: The vagaries of a critical reception,” Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982) 2, 22–3, 27. 49 Roland A. Duerksen, Shelleyan Ideas in Victorian Literature (London: Mouton, 1966) 166–74. 50 Matthew Arnold, “Byron,” (1881), Essays in Criticism, Second Series (London: Macmillan, 1888) 204. Originally published as Arnold’s preface to Poetry of Byron, chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold (London: Macmillan, 1881). 51 Arnold, “Byron,” 165. 52 Allott, “Attitudes,” 22. 53 Valeria Tinkler-Villani, “Victorian Shelley: Perspectives on a Romantic Poet,” Configuring Romanticism: Essays offered to C.C. Barfoot, eds Theo D’haen, Peter Liebregts, and Wim Tiggers assisted by Colin Ewen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003) 93. 54 Tinkler-Villani, “Victorian Shelley,” 96, 102. 55 Shaw to Edwin Paget Palmer, 26 February 1885, Collected Letters, 118–19. 56 Fuller Maitland includes C. Hubert H. Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, Alexander Campbell Mackenzie, Arthur Goring Thomas and Frederic Cowen in his list of Renaissance composers, which makes up a specifically English school (English Music, 185). Hughes and Stradling agree with the list, although they stress that it was British rather than English (English Musical Renaissance, 38–9). The idea of whether the Musical Renaissance was English or British continues to be debated, as occurred at the EMR panel at the Seventieth Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society (2005). 57 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein (1818), is subtitled “The Modern Prometheus.” 58 P.B. Shelley, preface, Prometheus Unbound (1820) by Percy Bysshe Shelley in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977) 135. 59 See Hughes’ discussion of Joseph Bennett’s review of Parry’s premier performance of Symphony No. 3, “English.” Hughes, Watchmen, 149–50. 60 Cited in the editor’s note to Shaw’s letter to Richard Bentley & Son (18 February 1882) Collected Letters 1874–1897, ed. Laurence, 48. 61 Michael Allis proposed this very interesting idea to me during a conversation about this chapter. 62 Dibble, Parry, 184; Anne Dzamba Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English (London: Associated University Presses, 1979) 28. 63 Hughes and Stradling, English Musical Renaissance, 222. 64 Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 16. 65 Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review (February 1891), rpt in The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001) 128.



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77 78

79 80

81

82 83

Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 133. Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 142. Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 144. Shaw, “Messiah in the Albert Hall” (27 December 1876); “Wagner at Covent Garden Theatre” (27 June 1877); “The Handel Festival” (4 July 1877); “The Opera Season in Retrospect: I” (18 July 1877); “The Opera Season in Retrospect: II” (25 July 1877); all rpt in Shaw’s Music, 1: 75–6, 140–1, 151–2, 160, 164. Michael Musgrave, “Changing Values in Nineteenth-Century Performance: The Work of Michael Costa and August Manns,” Music and British Culture, eds Bashford and Langley, 169, 176–8. Shaw, “Vocalists of the Season: Sir Michael Costa,” (1 August 1877), rpt in Shaw’s Music, 1: 169, 170. See also Musgrave, “Changing Values,” 183–4. Original emphasis. The reference to playing the orchestra like a piano recalls Berlioz’s similar pronouncements in “Euphonia” and Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (1843), considered in Chapter 2 of the present volume. Hugo Riemann, Katechismus der Kompositionslehre [Musikalische Formenlehre] originally published as Grundriss der Kompositionslehre (Leipzig, 1889) 2: 124. Cited in Catherine Coppola, “The Elusive Fantasy: Genre, Form, and Program in Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini,” 19th Century Music 22.2 (1998): 170. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), Cabinet edn., 3 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1878) 1: 68. Leanne Langley, “Agency and Change: Berlioz in England, 1870–1920,” 4th Biennial International Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, University of Leeds, UK, 25 July 2003. The fictional work expresses opinions about musical professors and schools that Shaw held throughout his journalist career. See Shaw, “Nearly a Blank” (3 January 1877), rpt in Shaw’s Music, 1: 79; Shaw, “Analytic Criticism,” The World (16 August 1893); rpt in Shaw’s Music, 2: 961. G.B. Shaw, “How to become a Musical Critic,” The Scottish Musical Monthly (December 1894), rpt in The New Music Review (October 1912), rpt in How to become a Musical Critic, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Hart-Davis, 1960) 2. Shaw, “How to become a Musical Critic,” 5. See Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Aldershot: Scolar, 1986) and Sutton’s chapter, “Commercialism and Consumerism: Wagnerism in The Savoy,” in her book, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 117–42. Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley, 25. For an excellent history of Anglo-American criticism of decadence, including ideas about l’art pour l’art as autonomous versus economically engaged, see Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 3, 218–19 n34. Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A cultural history (New York: Norton, 1992) 32–3, 277; Ian Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, preface, Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Edward Arnold, 1979) 7–13; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1990; London: Virago, 1995) 169. Hugh Montgomery to Parry, 20 April 1879. Shulbrede Priory, Lynchmere, Sussex. Cited in Dibble, Parry, 172. Emma Sutton, “ ‘The Music Spoke for Us’: Music and Sexual Identity in finde-siècle Poetry,” The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Weliver, 213–29.



Notes 213

214

Notes

84 For Wilde, see Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 7, 51–99.


1 For Ward’s progress on the novel, see Mrs Humphry Ward, introduction, Robert Elsmere by Mrs Humphry Ward, Westmoreland edn (London: Smith, Elder, 1911) 1: xvi. 2 David Donald Stone, Novelists in a Changing World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1972) 1, 47; Henry James, “Mrs Humphry Ward” (1891), Essays in London and Elsewhere (London: Osgood, 1893) 265–6; William S. Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976) 1, 159. 3 Mrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere (1888; London: Smith, 1890) 418. Further page references appear in parentheses. 4 Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 196. 5 Arnold Schoenberg, “Brahms the Progressive” (1947), Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber, 1975) 398–441. My thanks to Michael Allis for this source. 6 Janet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward (London: Constable, 1923) 29. 7 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866), rpt in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962) 3: 301 [hereafter CL]. 8 See Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995) 62–89. 9 Stefan Collini, introduction, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings by Matthew Arnold, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) xx. 10 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869) in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 135–6 [hereafter CA]. 11 Arnold, CL, 337–41. 12 Stephen Prickett, “Purging Christianity of its Semitic Origins: Kingsley, Arnold and the Bible,” Rethinking Victorian Culture, eds Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (London: Macmillan, 2000) 71. 13 Arnold, CL, 3: 337. 14 Young, Colonial Desire, 70. 15 Stefan Collini, Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (1988; Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) 85. 16 Arnold, CL, 3: 344–5. 17 Arnold, CL, 3: 341. 18 Arnold, CA, 135–7. 19 Young, Colonial Desire, 67–68. 20 Mrs Humphry Ward, introduction, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, Haworth edn. (London: Smith, Elder, 1899) xx–xxi. 21 Ward, introduction, Villette, xxvii–xxviii.



6

22 Ward, introduction, Villette, xxviii, xxxi. 23 Aristotle, Politics VIII.7.5–6; Rhetoric II.1.8; Poetics, sec.9, 1449b25–30, trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970) 25. 24 Arnold, CA, 67. 25 See H.R. Haweis, “Forewords on Robert Elsmere,” The Broad Church: Or what is coming (London: Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1891) 1–20. 26 Stone, Novelists, 48; Vineta Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (1970; New York: New York University Press, 1972) 136. 27 Mrs Humphry Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (London: Collins, 1918) 232. 28 Ward, Writer’s Recollections, 232. 29 Letter from Henry James to Mrs Humphry Ward, 5 July 1888, cited in Ward, introduction, Robert Elsmere, xxxix. 30 Peterson, Victorian Heretic, 141. 31 John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (1975), 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 24–5. 32 William Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper,” Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) 185, lines 25–6, 29–32. 33 Playing the violin also marks Rose’s character as progressive for the violin only became an acceptable women’s instrument in the 1870s. Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 (London: Macmillan, 2000) 109–34; Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of music, science and gender in the leisured home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 46–7. 34 Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 81–3. 35 Phyllis Weliver, “Music, crowd control and the female performer in Trilby,” The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, eds Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 57–80. 36 Gage McWeeny, “Crowd Management: Matthew Arnold and the science of society,” Victorian Poetry 41.1 (2003): 105. 37 Collini, Arnold, 81. 38 Arnold, CA, 84–5; McWeeny, “Crowd Management,” 106. 39 Benjamin Disraeli, Vindication of the English Constitution (London: Saunders and Oley, 1835) 12; Disraeli, Coningsby: or The New Generation (1844; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) 266; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of The Church and State (London: Hurst, Chance, 1830) 47–52; Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History in Works of Thomas Carlyle, 7: 147–8, cited in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto, 1958) 84. Williams gives no further bibliographic information. 40 Arnold, CA, 84. 41 McWeeny, “Crowd Management,” 107. 42 Arnold, CA, 86. 43 Arnold, CA, 83. 44 G.H. Lewes, Rose, Blanche, and Violet, 3 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1848) 2: 169. Further page references appear in parentheses. 45 Entry for Alfred Bunn by Nigel Burton, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 2001) 4: 604; entry



Notes 215

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66

67 68

69

Notes for Ignaz Moscheles by Jerome Roche and Henry Roche, 17: 163–4; entry for Henry Phillips by George Biddlecombe, 19: 598–9; entry for John Wilson, by Alexis Chitty, A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. George Grove, 4 vols (London: Macmillan, 1899) 4: 463, 817. Subsequent information on these figures comes from these sources. Entry for Michael William Balfe by Nigel Burton with Ian D. Halligan, New Grove, 2: 534–8. Entry for John Wilson by Chitty, Dictionary, 463. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), Cabinet edn., 3 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1878) 1: 67. Further page references appear in parentheses. Brian Masters, The Life of E.F. Benson (London: Chatto, 1991) 101. Masters, Life, 99–104. E.F. Benson, Dodo: A detail of the day (London: Methuen, 1893) 1: 31, 24. Further page references appear in parentheses. For Edith Stain and Ethel Smyth, see Masters, Life, 105. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, introduction, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, eds Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) 1, 12. Masters, Life, 8, 88–106. Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1964) 114. Vernon Lee, Baldwin: being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (London: Unwin, 1886) 353. Arnold, CA, 110. Original emphasis. Arnold, CA, 104, 110. Arnold, CA, 186. Edmund Gurney, “Wagner and Wagnerism,” The Nineteenth Century 13 (March 1883): 436, 449. Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder, 1880) 412. For Wagner’s music as lacking beauty and therefore invoking no pleasurable response, see Edmund Gurney, “Music and Musical Criticism,” The Nineteenth Century 4 ( July 1878): 66. Vernon Lee, Althea: A Second Book of Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (London: Osgood, 1894) 63. Further page references appear in parentheses. Angela Leighton, “Ghosts, Aestheticism, and ‘Vernon Lee’,” Victorian Literature and Culture 28.1 (2000): 4. Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1964) 112. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) 86. Further page references appear in parentheses. Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003) 154–5. My thanks to Meirion Hughes for a suggesting that nineteenth-century English concerts continued to be a place to make matches, despite the music establishment’s promotion of concerts as solely about music and, sometimes, also about social improvement. I have seen support for this opinion in the fiction of the period. E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910), ed. Oliver Stallybrass (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) 44–5. Further page references appear in parentheses.



216

Notes 217

1 2

3

James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: a Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 228–36. Joseph Bennett, Daily Telegraph (25 May 1889) n.p. Cited in Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 149–50. George Eliot, “Armgart” (1870), The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New (1874), Cabinet edn. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1879) 86. Scene 1, lines 196–200.



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Bibliography

Ackerman, Bruce, 24 aeolian harp, 54, 76–7, 201n 67 Aesthetic movement, 147, 153–5, 177 aesthetic writing, 25–6, 27, 127, 163–4, 188 aesthetics, musical, 25, 28, 104 Albee, Ernest, 31 Allis, Michael, 75, 136 Alsager, Thomas, 14 ancient music, 158, 178, 180 Andersen, Hans Christian, 89 Anderson, Benedict, 8–9, 10, 18, 19, 20, 84, 107 anthropology, 102, 137 Arendt, Hanna, 5, 24 Aristotle, 163 Arnold, Matthew, 5, 17, 28–9, 144, 162, 171 Hellenic and Hebraic, 157, 158, 160–2, 163–4, 169, 170, 171 poetry, 29, 165 works: Culture and Anarchy, 160, 161, 167, 169–71, 177, 179; Essays in Criticism, 29; Literature and Dogma, 29; On the Study of Celtic Literature, 161–2 Arnold, Thomas, 162 associationism, see scientific discourses Athenæum, 144 audience, musical, 12, 26, 108, 114, 136, 142, 157, 180 conversation, 7, 12, 15, 39, 45, 49, 168, 174, 192n 54 divided attention, 43–4, 49, 53 encores, 15–17, 62, 123–4 leave-taking, 14, 98 listening, 12, 13, 14–15, 18, 28, 38, 41, 44–5, 53, 62–3, 65, 97, 100, 146, 156, 158, 167, 168, 174, 176, 178, 181–3, 186, 187 opera-going, 61–2, 112–15, 118–21, 127, 128, 174, 181–2

seating, 12, 21, 22, 38, 52, 182, 186 socializing, 13, 15, 17, 45, 158, 182–4, 187 unruly, 15–17, 39, 98, 130 see class-based audience behavior see concert-going audience, reading, see reading public Austen, Jane, 27, 95 Austro-German music, 61, 62 performance practices, 82, 85, 105–07, 119 political metaphor, 5, 64–8, 78, 80–2, 163, 166 Bach, J.S., 160, 162, 198nn 5, 7 Bagehot, Walter, 115, 120 Bain, Alexander, 117–18 Balfe, Michael William, 173 bands, 14, 35, 52, 56, 97, 98 Banfield, Stephen, 104 banjo, 175 bards, 93, 94, 124–5, 162 Barry, David, 38 Bashford, Christina, 13, 15, 62, 139 Beales, Derek, 112 Beardsley, Aubrey, 155 Beer, Gillian, 83, 127, 203n 10 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 75–6, 136, 160, 162 in fiction, 26, 106–07, 135, 139, 146, 159, 176, 182–3 Beethoven Quartett Society, 14 Bellini, Vincenzo, Norma, 112 Benhabib, Seyla, 5–6, 7, 24, 186, 187 Bennett, Joseph, 29, 187 Bennett, William Sterndale, 59, 198n 6 Benson, E.F., 27, 176 Dodo, 29, 131, 158, 173–6, 180, 185 Bentham, Jeremy, 30, 42, 55 see Panopticon see Utilitarianism Bèrillon, Edgar, 49 236



Index

Berlioz, Hector, 27, 58, 59, 60, 135, 151, 198n 8, 202n 75 “Euphonia,” 26, 27, 29, 57, 77–82, 85, 107, 173, 185, 202n 75, 213n 71 Grand Traité d’instrumentation, 79, 202n 74, 312n 71 L’Art du chef d’orchestre, 67 Mémoires, 132 Symphonie Fantastique, 13 see George Bernard Shaw Bernstein, Susan, 4 Bledsoe, Robert Terrell, 199n 15 Brahms, Johannes, 137, 142, 159–60, 166 Bright, John, 88 Britannia, 59 Brontë, Charlotte, 26, 70 Jane Eyre, 39, 41, 50 Shirley, 190n 2 Villette, 27, 29, 30–55, 57, 63, 64, 129, 157, 163, 184, 185 Brown, Clive, 198n 12 Bruckner, Anton, 75 Bunn, Alfred, 172, 173 Burke, Edmund, 46, 177 Burrow, George Man, 45 Butler, Samuel, 27, 37 Erewhon, 29, 57, 58, 69–77, 79, 82, 107, 173 Carlyle, Thomas, 17, 32, 35, 36, 170, 171 castanets, 176 Castle Society, 44 Cavour, Camillo, 86 Celtic, 161–2 music, 91–2, 93–4 see English music chamber music, 7, 61, 168 see Musical Union Chartism, 4, 18, 86, 88, 95 Cherubini, Luigi, 132 Chew, Ada Nield, 22 choirs, 1, 19–20, 21, 59, 61, 66, 72, 73, 74 Chorley, Henry, 60, 198n 12 class-based audience behavior, 12, 14, 16–17, 18, 62, 174–5, 186, 187

237

class politics, 4, 15, 21, 57, 68, 86–7, 88, 157, 158, 182–4, 189 “two nations,” 15, 184, 192n 57 class-specific culture, 101, 104–05 see rational recreation Clément, Catherine, 105 climate theory, 28, 85, 95, 103–06, 108, 137, 186 Colby, Vineta, 164 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 24, 32, 55, 170, 171, 177 collectives, formation of, 16, 25, 29, 42–3, 57, 61, 64, 66, 97, 100, 101, 105, 108, 116, 147, 148, 149, 150, 157, 168–9, 170, 176, 185, 186 see audiences, listening see moral management see survelliance Collini, Stefan, 147, 160 Collins, Wilkie, 23, 24, 27, 52, 87 competition festivals, see festivals composers, 70, 79–80, 146, 156, 158, 172–3, 182 female, 59, 63, 64, 89, 106–07, 123, 175 ostracized, 131–55, 159 see under individual names compare writer concert etiquette, see audiences going: 18th-century norms, 5, 6, 12, 43–4, 45, 61–2; in Villette, 40, 41–6, 47, 49, 50–3 hall, 7, 11–12, 30, 41, 43, 45, 46, 112, 186–7 see mobs Concerts of Ancient Music, 139 concerts Hallé, 98 Harley Street, 15, 63, 146, 151 conductor, musical, 59, 63, 65–7, 68, 79, 142, 147–8, 149, 150 compare Dickens Conolly, John, 34 conservatories, 20, 41–3, 46, 78, 202nn 74, 75, 86 contagion, 167 Cornhill Magazine, The, 209n 42 Costa, Michael, 148



Index

Index

Cowen, Frederic, 212n 56 Critic, The, 59 Crotch, William, 104 crowds, Villette, 52, 53–4 see mobs Crystal Palace, 3, 13, 20, 98 Cullen, M.J., 30–1 Cummings, W.H., 21 Curwen, John, 1, 19, 20, 21 Curwen, J. Spencer, 18 Daily Telegraph, 188 Dainotto, Roberto M., 103 Dale, Catherine, 13 Dannreuther, Edward, 140–5 Dante, 87 Darwin, Charles, 28, 178 Davidoff, Leonore, 8, 10 Davidson, John, 155 Davison, James W., 26 Decadence, 154, 155, 177 Dellamora, Richard, 120 democracy, 94, 170, 183 De Quincey, Thomas, 27, 51–2, 53 Dibble, Jeremy, 142, 145 Dickens, Charles, 26, 58, 70, 129 conducting, 23–4 Pickwickian, 26 public readings, 22, 23, 117 works: Barnaby Rudge, 190n 2; Bleak House, 30; Hard Times, 35–8; Oliver Twist, 35, 37; A Tale of Two Cities, 190n 2 discussion groups, 19th-century, 203n 78 Disraeli, Benjamin, 26, 37, 57, 58, 67, 70, 170, 184 Coningsby, 35, 190n 2 Sybil, 15, 35, 56, 57, 190n 2, 192n 57 Dissenters, 18, 86, 95 divided attention, 43–4, 49, 53 Donizetti, Gaetano, 87 Drawing Room Gazette, The, 75 Dulckens, Louise, 15 Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 110 Du Maurier, George, Trilby, 100, 118, 167 Duncan, Ian, 94

economics, 31, 38, 94, 132, 139, 153 see market power see materialism Economist, The, 115 education, 61, 64–5, 158, 177–8, 187 music, 19, 43, 61, 64–5, 78 in schools, 41, 43, 139 see rational recreation see sight singing Elgar, Edward “Land of Hope and Glory,” 1, 2 landscape, 28 Eliot, George, 27 Adam Bede, 91 Armgart, 188 Daniel Deronda, 7, 131, 150, 172, 175–7, 180 Felix Holt, 190n 2 Middlemarch, 172 “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story,” 91 Romola, 87, 209n 42 Ella, John, 13, 14, 139, 140 Ellis, Katharine, 202n 69 Elton, Arthur Hallam, 125 empire, 20, 70–4, 77, 82, 95–6, 99–100, 107 encores, 15–17, 62, 123–4 English music, 99–101, 105 Celtic elements in, 28, 144 Englishness, 28, 145, 187–8 opera, 108, 127–8, 171–3 performance practices, 26, 106, 136, 148–9, 174 English Musical Renaissance, 3, 28, 131–55, 160, 183, 187, 212n 56 Esterházys, 96 ethnomusicology, see empire event, musical, 45, 53, 61, 97, 114 fantasias, 135, 138, 146, 148, 150 Fauré, Gabriel, 178 female, see gender festivals, music, 60, 65, 75, 80, 201n 59 fiction as aesthetic, 25–6, 27, 127, 163–4, 188 critical-rational writing, overlap with, 26, 27, 62, 81, 153, 181, 185



238

industrial novels, 35–8, 56, 61, 64, 69 literary history, 88, 91, 157, 163, 181 as lyrical, 126–7 national tale, 93, 205n 37 Romantic influences on, 27, 51, 54, 88 utopian, 57–8, 69–82 see modernism in literature Field, Michael, 155 Fielding, J.K., 37 Fingal’s Caves, 69, 76–7, 201n 67 Finn, Margot C., 86, 87 Fischlin, Daniel, 120 Forster, E.M., 27 Howards End, 17, 29, 158, 182–4, 185, 186 Fortnightly Review, 83, 88 Foucault, Michel, 9, 33, 64–7 French music, 62, 102, 175–6 Fuller, Sophie, 199n 23 Fuller Maitland, J.A., 212n 56 Gage, W.L., 64 Galkin, Elliot W., 67 Gallagher, Catherine, 35, 36 Gardiner, William, 104 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 87 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 27, 104 Ruth, 30 gaze, the, see surveillance compare audience listening Gazette Musicale, 77 gender fallen women, 30 female Bildungsroman, 86 female harpists, 85, 88–95, 99, 101, 106 female improvisator, 89–91, 107 New Woman, 175, 176 see composers genius, 131–55, 158, 169–72, 175–7, 188 geography, 28, 72, 80, 82, 85, 89–95, 103, 107, 108, 120, 137, 164–5 Germany, music of, 159–71 New German School, 131, 132 see Austro-Germany

239

Giddens, Anthony, 7–8, 9, 10 Gillett, Paula, 133 Gladstone, W.E., 4, 88 Glen, Heather, 39 Glover, Sarah, 18, 19 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 78, 80 Orfeo et Euridice, 178, 180–1 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 161 Gounod, Charles-François, Faust, 174 government democracy, 94, 170, 183 monarchy, 115–16, 118, 119 republic, 115–17, 118 see imagination see music Graham-Jones, Ian, 63 Gray, John, 155 Grieg, Edvard, 178 group management, see collectives Grove, George, 12, 13 Gurney, Edmund, 108, 178–9 Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 24, 25, 81 Hall, Catherine, 8, 10 Hallé concerts, 98 Hall-Witt, Jennifer L., 61–2 Hammerstein, Oscar, 2 Handel, George Frideric, 1, 28, 69, 71, 74–6, 77, 142, 201n 59 Israel in Egypt, 75 Messiah, 65–6 Prelude to the Suite in B-flat, 24 Harley Street concerts, 15, 63, 146, 151 harpists, female, 85, 88–95, 99, 101, 106 Haweis, H.R., 164 Haydn, Joseph, 96 Hazlitt, William, 31, 33 Hearder, Harry, 86, 112 Hellenic and Hebraic, 157, 158, 160–2, 163–4, 169, 170, 171 Hensel, Fanny (Mendelssohn), 64 Hensel, Sebastian, 66 Heraud, John A., 124 Herbert, Christopher, 71 Hollander, John, 165 Holroyd, Michael, 132



Index

Index

Hook, Andrew D., 50 Hornet, The, 133, 148 Horsley, Charles, 59, 60, 82, 197n 4, 198n 8 Household Words, 23 Hueffer, Francis, 3 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 28 Hughes, Meirion, 137, 142, 143, 187, 216n 68 Hullah, John, 18, 21, 59, 82 Huxley, T.H., 88 imagination, 50–2, 54 and government, 33, 57, 67–8, 115–16, 120 imagined communities, see nation imperialism, see empire improvisation, musical, 151–2 improvisator, female 89–91, 107 individual, the, 67, 132, 138, 141, 146, 147–8, 150–1, 155, 156–84, 185, 187 see genius Individualism, Liberal, 147 insanity, 34, 45–6 Irish music, 162 Irvine, William, 133 Italy and England, 86–7, 89, 92, 96–7, 101 music nationalism, 89, 104 and opera, 62, 96, 102, 108, 110–29 performance practices, 5, 78, 80, 82, 85, 105–07, 119 see Risorgimento Jacobus, Mary, 140 James, Henry, 163, 164 James, William, 182 Jessopp, Augustus, 108 Joachim, Joseph, 159 Johnson, James H., 186 journals, 15, 17, 27, 175, 184 theory of, 25 influence of, 11, 12, 25–6, 39, 211n 30 see under individual titles journalists, 26, 61, 77, 87, 124–5, 128, 132, 133, 140, 186

Keats, John, 76 Kimbell, David R.B., 123 Kingsley, Charles, 35 Kolb, Katherine, 81 Lampadius, Wilhelm Adolf, 66 landscape, see geography Lange, Carl, 182 Langley, Leanne, 151 Lasserre, Jules Bernard, 140 Leader, 87 leader, artist as, 17, 67, 107, 117, 131, 136, 145, 147, 156, 158, 171, 175–7 Leavis, Q.D., 22 Lee, George J. Vandeleur, 133 Lee, Vernon, 27, 155 Althea, 29, 158, 177–82, 183 Baldwin, 177 Leighton, Angela, 179 Lewes, G.H., 27, 83, 84, 88 Rose, Blanche, and Violet, 171–3 Liberal Individualism, 147 Lind, Jenny, 59, 60, 198n 9 Lipps, Theodor, 182 listening, see audiences Liszt, Franz, 75, 131, 142 literacy musical, 9, 17–21 written words, 8, 18–19, 22, 84–5, 108, 112, 119 see also nation Lokke, Kari E., 90 Lovell, Terry, 40, 42 Luhmann, Niklas, 9–10 Lunn, Henry Charles, 12, 25 lute, 97 Lyotard, Jean-François, 9 lyre, 89 Mackenzie, Alexander Campbell, 137, 212n 56 Macmillan’s Magazine, 12 Macpherson, James, 92–3 Mahler, Gustav, 75 Mainzer, Joseph, 18 Malibran, Maria, 59, 62, 63, 198n 8 market power, 17, 23, 140, 141, 146–7 Marx, Karl, 133



240

Mason, William, 104 mass management, see collectives mass-music movements, 98, 137 see rational recreation see sight singing materialism, 56–82, 132, 134–5, 142, 152, 185 see economics Maturin, Charles Robert, 27, 92–3, 95 Maxse, Frederick, 88, 108, 128 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 86, 87, 93, 110, 116 McCartney, Paul, 2 McClary, Susan, 121 McVeigh, Simon, 5, 44 McWeeny, Gage, 167, 169 medicine, see scientific discourses melancholia, 45–6 Mendelssohn, Felix, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65–6, 82, 142, 149, 151, 198nn 8, 9, 202n 75 Hebrides, The, 60, 76, 201n 65 Heimkehr aus der Fremde, 60, 198n 12 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 60 oratorios, 60 Meredith, George, 27 theories of fiction, 124–5 works: The Egoist, 96–7; Richard Feverel, 163; Sandra Belloni, 17, 27, 29, 83–109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 123, 127, 128, 129, 157, 163, 185; Vittoria, 27, 29, 83–4, 86, 87, 88, 95, 107–09, 110–29, 149, 172, 181–2, 185 mesmerism, 22, 49, 118 Michael, Jennifer Davis, 76 Middleton, Jessie A., 59, 63 Mill, J.S., 31–2, 33, 55, 88 mobs, 18, 21, 25, 50, 169, 192n 57 at concerts, 15–17, 97–101, 105, 129, 133, 169, 184 crowd psychology, 22, 23, 49, 101, 115, 117, 167, 179, 185 and opera, 111–15, 119–20 in theatres, 49–50, 54 modernism in literature, 8, 27, 29, 131, 132, 146–7, 150, 153, 155, 156–84, 186

241

modernity, 7, 9–10 see also the social monarchy, 115–16, 118, 119 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de, 103 Montgomery, Hugh, 154 monuments, musical, 75–6, 80, 201n 59 moral management, 34, 195n 22 see rational recreation More, Thomas, 70 Morley, John, 88 Morning Chronicle, 15 Morton, A.L., 70 Moscheles, Ignaz, 172, 173 Motte-Fenelon, François de Salignac de la, 42 music as “event,” 45, 53, 61, 97, 114 and governance, 21, 56–82, 117, 159, 169, 173, 185 and language, 102–05, 108, 115 nationalism, 28, 58, 85, 89, 99–108, 118, 128, 137, 183, 185 political events, relationship to, 110–29, 172 political metaphor, 5, 64–8, 69–70, 77, 78, 80–2, 100, 163, 166 and scientific discourses, 3, 4 and Utilitarianism, 36 as “work,” 62, 63, 70, 78 see audience see under individual country names musical monuments,75–6, 80, 201n 59 Musical Times, 12, 25, 39, 98, 140 Musical Union, 13, 14, 62, 97, 139, 140 Musical World, 26 nation self-determinism of, 83, 88, 97, 115, 117 theories of, 8, 17, 19–20, 25, 29, 84, 85, 93, 120, 186, 188 see Benedict Anderson nationalism, see music national tale, 93, 205n 37 Nazar, Hina, 6 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 26, 76



Index

Index

New German School, 131, 132 New Woman, 175, 176 Novello, J. Alfred, 12 Oliphant, Margaret, 27, 203n 13 opera in fiction, 59, 84, 110–29, 172, 174, 181–2 house, 7, 11–12, 52, 108, 111–15, 112, 123, 128, 130–1, 172, 174–5, 186 libretto, 27, 108, 113–14, 119, 123, 124, 126–7, 143, 181 orchestra, 78, 81, 130 sexuality in, 120–1 theories of, 105, 120–1 see audiences opium, 50–3 oratorios, 61 in fiction, 59, 60 see George Frideric Handel orchestra, 61, 66, 79 orchestra, 78, 81, 130 performance and rehearsal practices, 65, 138, 148–9 working-class, 59 organists, 69, 96 organs, 69, 73, 77, 78 Ossian, 76, 92–3 Our Corner, 133, 156 Owenson, Sydney, 27 Wild Irish Girl, The, 91–2 Paganini, Niccolò, 198n 7 Palmerston’s Police Bills, 42 Panopticon, 33, 64–5, 67, 78 Parakilas, James, 43–4 Parker, Roger, 111–13, 207n 8 Parry, C. Hubert H., 29, 137, 141–2, 154, 187, 212n 56 in fiction, 132, 135, 140, 141–3, 145, 211n 33 works: Cello Sonata in A, 140, 141; Guillem de Cabestanh, 142; “I Was Glad,” 1; Piano Concerto in F sharp, 142; Scenes from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, 137, 141–5, 153, 211n 41;

Studies of Great Composers, 136; Symphony No. 3, 187–8 Pauls, Birgit, 207n 8 People’s Entertainment Society, 133 performance practices orchestra, 65, 138, 148–9 national: Austro-German, 82, 85, 105–7, 119; England, 26, 106, 136, 148–9, 174; Italy, 5, 78, 80, 82, 85, 105–07, 119 Peterson, William, 165 Philharmonic Society, 65 philistines, 131, 137, 152, 156, 177 Phillips, Henry, 172, 173 physiological associationism, see scientific discourses pianists, 42, 63, 79, 135, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 172 Plotz, John, 8, 11, 25, 26, 53, 54 Poland, 86, 135, 150 Poovey, Mary, 31 Poriss, Hilary, 123 Porter, Theodore M., 31 Prickett, Stephen, 161 primitive music, 154–5, 160, 167, 168 private concerts, 5–7, 86, 95, 146, 157, 168–9, 187 see chamber music Proceedings of the Musical Association, 25 programming, 14, 16, 100, 101, 137, 140, 141, 158, 179 program notes, 12–14, 26, 28, 62, 97–8, 138, 182 progressive music, 131, 136, 137, 138, 141, 145, 147, 155, 159, 178 compare English Musical Renaissance Prometheus Unbound Parry’s, 137, 141–5, 153, 211n 41 Shaw’s, 141–5, 153, 211n 41 Shelley’s, 143–5 public sphere, 4, 7, 10–11, 14, 15, 16–17, 18, 21, 24–6, 45, 55, 81, 127, 131, 138, 150, 189 see also the social Rachel, 47 rational recreation, 18, 38, 56, 68, 99, 100, 133, 158, 169, 184



242

Reade, Charles, 87 readers, 129, 168–9, 176 as musical audience, 126–9 reading public, 22–5, 40, 55, 81–2, 84, 108–9, 177, 188 see Charles Dickens see literacy Rehding, Alexander, 75–6 Reeves, Sims, 16 religion, 18, 31, 32, 57, 67, 70–2, 74, 76–7, 159, 164, 166, 168, 170, 174 repertoire, see programming republicanism, 115–17, 118 revolutions, 4, 5, 29, 45–6, 54, 82, 83–123, 143, 185 Richardson, Angelique, 175 Riemann, Hugo, 150 Riley, Denise, 6 Risorgimento, 86, 87, 108, 110–29 Rodgers, Richard, 2 Romanticism, 10, 33–4, 54, 76–7, 88–95, 106, 145, 147, 165 Rosselli, John, 112, 113 Rossetti, D.G. and Christina, 87 Rossetti, William Michael, 144 Rossini, Gioachino, 123 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 42, 95, 101–04 Royal Philharmonic Society, see Philharmonic Society Rubinstein, Anton, 159, 160 Ruffini, Giovanni D., 27, 87, 111 Ruskin, John, 17, 28, 136, 171 Russell, Dave, 18 Said, Edward, 73, 74 Saint Cecilia, 59 Sappho, 89 Savonarola, 87 Sawall, Michael, 207n 8 Schoenberg, Arnold, 159 Schumann, Robert, 26, 76, 178 scientific discourses, 26, 28, 162, 167 acoustics, 28 anthropology, 102, 137 evolution, 83–05, 95, 104–05, 115, 116–17, 120, 132, 133, 136, 149, 158, 162, 177, 178, 179, 186, 203n 6

243

medicine, 34, 47, 55, 63, 69 melancholia, 45–6 mental science, 117–18, 120, 186 and music, 3, 4 nervous disease, 34, 63 philology, 161 physiological associationism, 22, 83–4, 95, 104, 110, 178–9, 181–2, 183 reflexive actions, 84, 95, 101, 108, 115, 117–18 see mesmerism see moral management score study, 137, 138, 142, 149, 174, 183 Scott, John T., 103 Scott, Walter, 27 Waverley, 89, 91–5 Scottish music, 104, 162 sexuality in opera, 120–1 and Wagner, 154–5 Shaw, George Bernard, 27, 60, 108, 178 music criticism, 132, 133, 141, 148, 209n 7 works: “How to become a Musical Critic,” 153; The Irrational Knot, 17, 133–4; Love among the Artists, 26, 29, 131–55, 156–7, 159, 172, 173, 185, 211n 37; The Perfect Wagnerite, 143; “A Reminiscence of Hector Berlioz,” 130–2, 135, 151, 152 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 143–5 Sheppard, Elizabeth Sara, 27 Charles Auchester, 27, 29, 30, 34, 39, 57–69, 70, 78, 80, 82, 107, 129, 148, 149, 157, 163, 166, 173, 185 Shuttleworth, Sally, 30, 39, 54, 68 sight singing, 18–21, 38, 56, 169, 182, 192n 61, 200n 35 singers, solo, 59, 63, 78, 79–80, 85, 91, 94, 96 singing classes, 56, 59, 166 Small, Helen, 22, 23, 38, 45 Smith, Adam, 31 Smith, Alice Mary, 63



Index

Index

Smith, Goldwin, 88 Smyth, Ethel, 174, 176 social, the, 6, 31, 37, 147, 179–80, 186, 189 see audience socializing social body, 45, 54, 166, 169–70 socialism, 87, 133, 134, 147, 183, 186 solo performers, 61, 62 see virtuoso Spencer, Herbert, 28, 84, 88, 104–05, 116–17, 136 Spohr, Louis, 65, 159, 160, 165 Staël, Germaine de, 27 Corinne, ou l’Italie, 89–92, 94–5, 107 Stanford, Charles Villiers, 137, 212n 56 Star, The, 133 statistics, social, 30, 35 Stephen, Leslie, 88 Stone, Donald David, 164 Stone, J.S., 83, 95, 125 Stradella, Alessandro, 88 Stradling, Robert, 137, 143 Strauss, Richard, 75, 131 Sutton, Emma, 12, 154, 155 Swift, Jonathan, 163 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 108 Sykes, Ingrid, 69 Symons, Arthur, 155 sympathy, 32, 33–4, 53, 105, 113, 114, 126, 136, 179 Tanner, Tony, 41, 45 Taylor, Jenny Bourne, 34, 68 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il’yich, 75 Temperley, Nicholas, 197n 4, 198n 6 Thalberg, Sigismund, 59, 80, 198n 7 theatre, 11, 30, 40, 44, 46–50, 54, 61, 112, 146, 154 Thomas, Arthur Goring, 212n 56 Thomas, Downing A., 102 Thomson, James, 144 Thomson, John, 13 Todd, R. Larry, 198n 5, 199n 14, 202n 75 Tonic Sol-fa Reporter, 20 Trumpener, Katie, 92, 205n 37

Tunnel über der Pleisse, 203n 78 Turner, J.M.W., 76 uncanny, 76 Utilitarianism, 31–7, 47, 55, 57, 58, 64, 68, 186 and fiction, 35–6, 48–9 and music, 36 see Jeremy Bentham Varnhagen, Rahel, 5, 6 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 29 Verdi, Giuseppe, 110–13, 122, 123, 207n 8 La Traviata, 110 Nabucco, 113 Victoria, Queen, 2, 116 Vincent, David, 18–19 Vincent, John, 67 violinists, 59, 63, 65, 94, 157–8, 159, 164–71 virtuoso, 61, 80, 82, 172, 188 Wagner, Richard, 131, 135, 137, 142, 143, 145, 151, 153, 159–60, 178 primitive music, 154–5, 160 works: review short stories, 26; Über das Dirigeren, 67 Wagnerism, 154–5 Wagnerites, 140, 154, 164, 175 Walton, Peter, 2 Ward, Mrs Humphry, 27, 127, 178 Robert Elsmere, 27, 29, 155, 156–71, 173, 180, 185, 204n 13 Weber, Carl Maria von, 202n 74 Weber, William, 21, 44 Welsh music, 135, 144, 162 Werner, Eric, 197n 4, 198nn 8, 9 Westminster Review, 117, 124 Whale, John, 32, 35 Wilde, Oscar, 147, 155 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 180–1 Williams, Ioan, 128, 203n 6 Willis, Chris, 175 Wilson, John, 172, 173 Winter, Alison, 22, 65, 79 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 25 woman, see gender



244

Index Young, Robert J.C., 161 Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 59, 197n 5 Zemka, Sue, 70



Wordsworth, William, 76, 165, 201nn 65, 67 work, musical, 62, 63, 70, 78 World, The, 133 writer like composer, 37 as social leader, see leader

245

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